by Dakota Krout
“How helpful.” The Elf sneered at the human’s back.
“Stop it. This is a Boss room, be on your guard. Remember, non-lethal.” The mediator Elf barked.
Poor Snowball had no chance. As soon as he appeared from the fog the earth under him turned to sand, and he sank under his own weight into the now-rapidly solidifying stone.
“Done. To the tree.” They walked away from Snowball, who was snarling more furiously than I have ever heard. Walking into the next room, they blinked as the air was instantly clear of fog and steam. I had separated the Boss room and my room after I noticed that the Silverwood tree was wilting in the high heat and humidity environment. Marching right up to the tree, they looked it over and *tisked *.
“Ugh, look at that. An Enchantment. How droll. It is weakening and obviously High-Elf workmanship.” The male Elf muttered.
Minya appeared curious, “How can you tell?”
“Because it is hastily and poorly done, but artistic.” The male chuckled, lost in his examination of the Enchantment around the tree. “Ah. Found it.” He reached forward and plucked with his fingers, and the pattern of the Enchantment started glowing, bleeding Essence into the air.
“Now we can put a better series of protections into place.” The female Elf informed Minya in response to her arched brow. “What? This area is important to us.”
“To me as well. We had an agreement, yes?” Minya folded her arms.
The female blushed while the male rolled his eyes, “Look, we can’t just leave you in here by yourself, especially without the protections in place.”
“So, you are both planning to ignore the agreement?” Minya began to glare, tensing her hands.
The male gave a cocky half grin. “Well I am.” He had barely spoken the words when Minya was behind him, delivering a strike to the base of his neck. He choked a moment, then fell to the floor. Not dead, sadly. This close to taking a B-ranked amount of Essence!
“What about you?” Minya breezily questioned, gazing at her fingernails.
The female sighed and nodded, “I’ll watch him in the other room.” She collected her fallen teammate and dragged him away.
When the room was cleared of Elves, Minya turned her attention back to the tree. “Dungeon.” She called softly.
“Dungeon. Dungeon!” Minya got much louder on the second word. “Answer me! I know I’m not crazy!” She cackled a little after that, which led me to disbelieve her a tiny bit.
“I just have some questions for you, Dungeon.” Minya narrowed her eyes. Her next words were far rougher, nearly a snarl. “Last chance Dungeon, or I’m going to reach in there and take your Core. I know you have a Wisp in there, I heard you talking to her. Feel like gambling with her safety?”
Minya blinked, “There are… others? Other people can help me prove my sanity?” Her expression had turned introspective.
I began talking to her hopefully.
“What?” Minya refocused on me. Well, mostly. Her attention was seeming to wander a bit. “Oh. No, if you are talking to me I won’t hurt you. Never ignore me!” She snarled the last part.
I fervently promised.
“Good. I hear…” she swallowed, “I hear that the Essence in here is pure. That anyone can use it. But upstairs it certainly had taint.”
“Hi human. Please don’t kill me either.” Dani was trembling a bit.
“What? Oh, no. I won’t. I’ve seen what happens to dungeons that lose their Wisps. Hello by the way.” Minya’s attention seemed variable. “Why isn’t the Essence pure upstairs anymore?” She demanded with a demented stare.
“I would assume because we are slowly getting farther away from the surface.” Dani soothingly told her. “Essence is flowing in from outside as well, and away from Cal the pure Essence has a chance to mix with what is already there.”
“Well, fix it! It is inside your influence, you are just getting lazy and fat with this Rune feeding you like a hedonistic Emperor.” Minya spat to the side, I absorbed it from force of habit.
“She has a what?” Dani muttered, obviously not hearing me correctly.
I was examining Minya, she had a similar setup to Dale, but poorly done and with a sub-standard Core. The Core wasn’t even around her Center, it was in her stomach!
Minya snarled and took a threatening step forward, “If I feel anything funny, I will destroy you.”
“What is she talking about?” Dani whispered as she eyed the crazy lady.
I didn’t keep my voice down, and Dani winced at my conversational tone. I turned the conversation back to Minya,
Minya looked downcast at losing her upper hand, and took a seat on the floor. “I’ve never heard a low-level dungeon like this be so coherent. Usually it is snarls and a few threats until they hit the upper C-ranks.” She seemed to be talking to herself.
Minya took a deep breath, “I need to give you a bit of background information. I’ve been a dungeon-diver for decades. A few years back, I got impatient. I wanted to break into the A-ranks, and didn’t want to do it the right way. The slow way. I found a dungeon that had four types of Essence in it, an elemental dungeon. That is, it had earth, air, fire, and water in near-equal amounts.” She paused, tearing up a bit.
“I… I forced open two more affinity channels. I had always had strong affinities with air and fire, but I figured that if I could just double the amount of Essence I drew in, I could reach the A-ranks in half the time. Mere days after I had opened the channels, someone killed the dungeon. I could hear the screams in my mind as its Core shattered and its thought patterns dissipated into its influence. A huge amount of corruption was released somehow. My raw meridians were forced open wider than I had wanted, allowing so much corruption into me that I would never have a chance to reach the next step in the B-ranks, let alone the A-rankings.”
“Not only that, but the land is still poisoned and unlivable.” She refocused on me. “That is where you come in! Ever since then, I can hear the voices in the dungeons. Others have called me insane, and I was starting to think they were right. You, though,” she cackled, “you respond! You talk to me!”
“I want you to tell people that you are alive!” She cried out, “I want them to know that I was right all along!”
“You can’t fix me.” She growled, “Someone already tried that. When I got free, the largest chunk of them that was ever seen again was a molar I somehow missed. Sure, I lost my place in the Guild, but they deserved it.”
“Celestial crap! She’s bonkers!” Dani mouthed at me while Minya was distracted.
“Pff. And you can? Get real.” She snorted, to my great offense. “They decided that what I needed was to swallow a Core, and that they would just take it out after it had absorbed the taint.”
She chuckled darkly, “I
assume you have seen the process then? Where a person swallows a Core and then pukes it up a bit later? Sound accurate? Well, when a person does not take the Core willingly, there are… side effects. Like the Core sticking to them, and draining them slowly. It is a bad way to die, Dungeon.”
She nodded, “Well, Cal, the Core in me absorbs all the corruption all right. Also, any Essence that I try to cultivate. I’ve had to carve Runes to block the flow of Essence just to keep the Core from exploding and turning my abdomen into ground meat when it finally becomes too full.” She lifted her shirt, exposing Runes carved directly into her skin that glowed with a malevolent light.
I memorized the pattern, I would experiment with it later. Heh. Thank you Minya.
She agreed angrily, “Skin heals over time. The Rune is breaking up, and will soon allow Essence into the Core. Then I will die. I want to prove my sanity before then. Also,” a bit of Essence arched form the Rune, shocking her with a tiny bolt of lightning, “it hurts like a mother.”
She folded her hands and tried not to be angry. “I would love to be fixed, but it isn’t possible.”
“Stop messing with my head!” She shrieked. “Just because I am desperate, doesn’t make me an idiot!”
She looked at Dani, “Is he… serious? Also, is Cal a he?”
Dani smirked, “He is serious, and since he has no reproductive organs he does not actually have a sex. I say ‘he’ because he has a masculine voice and I think he was male before he got in that Core.”
“Huh. I… I might live?”
“What do you want? I’m very wealthy. I could…” She started.
“You want me to… tell you about groups of adventurers?” She asked with an odd inflection.
“How many?” She sniffled.
“You want them a specific one? A set of Dwarven mathematics?”
She looked crestfallen. “I’m not… that rich.”
“I just want to live.” She softly muttered.
She took a deep breath, eyes dilating a bit. “Yes.”
Dani looked at me reproachfully, “Really?”
“Oh, right. She was in the B-Rankings. Yikes, I can’t believe how much internal damage she has! How is she alive right now?” Dani seemed suddenly impressed by this person’s tenacity.
I wondered why it was so easy to do, Mana users were exceedingly tough. I realized as I was working that without Mana being able to flow through her, the bonds had weakened. If she were unable to cultivate long enough, her body would have literally fallen apart chunk by chunk.
I repaired the external signs of wear next, the lines of stress and pain, making her hair shiny and lustrous instead of lank and unwashed. I even trimmed her nails to a reasonable length. Her clothes were — well — needing to be burnt doesn’t quite cover it. Instead of trying to wash her or something of the like, I simply absorbed any foreign substance, then grew a new set of clothing on her.
Dani was fascinated by the process, and offered a few other minor details that I wouldn’t have ever thought about, like opening capillaries a tiny bit wider in her lips so they would be a brighter red, or adjusting her eyebrow hair to be very thick, but only in a certain area. For some reason, she also had me remove the hair follicles anywhere that wasn’t on her head. Dani has strange concepts of what ‘fixing’ means.
It was now time to wake Minya up; hopefully she wouldn’t mind the changes. After all the fixes, there was nothing keeping her from getting up on her own, but it seemed that she was at the point of physical exhaustion. No wonder she had seemed insane, even if she only needed a tiny bit of sleep, she still needed it. I washed her brain free of the buildup of toxins that lack of sleep allows to accumulate, and she opened her eyes.
She started moving slowly, obviously waiting for the pain that had been a constant presence in her life for years. I knew this because I had had to work on her frazzled nerves. When she sat up and looked at herself in confusion, she had to ask, “How long was I out? I feel like I’ve slept for weeks. I feel… amazing.”
“About thirty minutes.” Dani informed her primly. “I hope you don’t ever forget your part of the bargain, Cal really went out of his way to fix you. He could have created a dozen Boss Mobs with all the Essence he used on you.”
Minya smoothly rose to her feet and began walking around. Her movements before had been jerky and rushed, like a person overdosing on stamina potions. She did a few flips and danced around, getting a feel for her body at the same time as showing her excitement. She whirled around and looked at where I was. “I am yours forever, Cal. Anything you need, anything in my power to do, I will. Your whim is my order!”
A line of her aura suddenly raced to me and connected to my Core, then dispersed into the dungeon at large. Also known as my aura.
“That was an oath. At the B-ranks, when mana is a part
of our body, our word becomes our law. Words have real power, and a spoken oath is binding.” Minya smiled, much more appealing now that I regrew a few teeth and straightened the rest. “I am yours unless you release me from my oath.”
“Back off, hussy.” Dani muttered very softly.
“Who are you? Where is Minya?” The female Elf sharply demanded, drawing steel.
The male scoffed. “Who cares? The bitch knocked me out!”
“What did you just call me?” Minya turned toward them dangerously, they gasped as they saw the changes in her. Her voice was a bit strange to them, having been healed as well, but they recognized her quickly enough.
“Minya?” The female murmured in wonderment.
“Mmhmm.” Minya allowed a smile to slowly spread on her face. “I’m going to sit and cultivate while you do your thing.”
“You’re going to what?” The male sputtered, “You’re committing suicide?!”
“Oh be quiet.” Minya muttered and moved to sit down.
“Hmm?”
She dipped in a vial that she had hastily poured out, a potent stamina potion of some kind that decreased the feeling of tiredness. She dipped the vial into the hole and retrieved a shining fluid, condensed Essence.
She murmured softly, so the Elves wouldn’t hear what she said. “Yes. I have the patterns in place for Essence up to the B-ranks, I am just depleted. This will help me get back on track, thank you.” I closed the hole as she put the vial to her flushed lips and drank. Her aura began to glow, as her Center drank in the pure Essence. She didn’t even show signs of discomfort — only relief — as her meridians began moving a torrent of energy versus the trickle it had been.
“Can I have more?” She asked a bit plaintively. I tried to respond, but her aura had thickened and condensed, apparently blocking my words. She seemed to understand the problem after a few minutes of failed communication, and subtly rearranged her aura so that the tendril of her aura that formed her oath to me had a clear path to her brain. Odd.
