Changing Faces (New Game Minus Book 1)

by Sarah Lin

  "I just wanted to say... thank you. For being the friend I needed in all this."

  Having someone thank him was a strange thing. Plenty of people had done so for his work as an adventurer, but the gratitude had been perfunctory and he didn't really care about them. Meara staring at him and speaking like this was something else entirely. "You are welcome, Meara."

  "Right now, there's just too much to think about. I'm not sure what I want in the end. And you said you're not sure either. But... I think I'd like to stay with you, while we get all this figured out."

  "I agree." Many other things were still confused in his head, but he was sure of that much. Meara's smile filled him with a warmth that left him uncomfortable, yet he prevented himself from shrinking back from it.

  "Then I'm glad I'm with you, Bl..." Meara coughed into one hand. "Gods, I'm sorry, that's hard to take seriously. Are you sure you don't have another name you'd prefer to use?"

  Bloodwraith scowled and folded his arms. "It's been my name for hundreds of years."

  "Then... I guess I'll have to get used to it. Thank you... Bloodwraith."

  They smiled at one another, then hurried into the city to find an inn. Though he'd barely fought for the entire day, Bloodwraith was exhausted.

  Chapter 17

  The next morning when Bloodwraith woke up, he stared at the unfamiliar ceiling and took a moment to remember where he was. It was better than waking up to boxes announcing that he was being attacked, of course. Slowly he recalled that he and Meara had gone to a small inn that wouldn't ask questions. He'd bought two rooms, which was a waste in a monetary sense, but worth it to avoid any confusion.

  Slowly Bloodwraith sat up in bed and pondered the small room. Thinking about the previous day was strange, but... not entirely disagreeable. With Meara on his side, he finally had a real ally in this conflict. No need to act carefully around her, unlike Danniah.

  Thoughts of her soured his mood, however, so Bloodwraith refocused on his upcoming day. He'd slept with most of his armor on as a precaution, but now he pulled on his boots and generally prepared for the day. Since this was a small inn there was just a simple table below with whatever the family had made, but he could smell sizzling meat and eggs.

  When he went downstairs, he found Meara sitting at the table. She gave him a wry smile when she saw him. "Morning, adventurer."

  "Good morning." He sat down and examined the food on the table. If he needed to deal with such desires, he might as well do it in a pleasant fashion as opposed to adventurer rations. "There is a great deal we should do today."

  "I was wondering about that. How do you adventurers actually spend your time?"

  "Dealing with inventories like petty merchants." Bloodwraith sighed as he began eating. "Everything is more tedious than you would expect. But for a start, I need to replace equipment I lost in the crypt and prepare for another such disaster. I made it through, but I never want to be so unprepared again."

  "I can save you money on potions." Meara smiled coyly as she played with her eggs. "Let's just say I can cover that side of things. Just give me some time while you're doing something else."

  "That will help, but equipment is terribly expensive. The market is ruined by all these adventurers..." He explained what the smith had told him and Meara nodded in understanding. Truthfully, his explanation devolved into complaining at some point, but he decided that was acceptable and she didn't object.

  They finished eating and headed out, taking everything with them. Once they were on the streets, Meara stuck close and they spoke to one another in low voices that would be lost in the chattering of the crowds.

  "As I see it," Bloodwraith said, "meeting Daek the Knife is inevitable. Either he'll attack us, or we'll go talk to him. Both have risks, since he's powerful in multiple ways. That meeting might come before we're ready, so we have no choice but to prepare as much as possible."

  "I can appreciate that logic. I could start on potions, but they won't take me very long. What do we try first?"

  "Replacing broken equipment and checking for unusual items at a shop owned by a man called Haral. That will get me back to square one and we can try to go from there."

  When they reached Haral's shop, the smith was actually gone for once. But when he heard the bell he emerged from a back room and nodded to them. His eyes lingered on Meara in simple curiosity, so Bloodwraith nodded to her.

  "This is my... associate. She'll be helping me evaluate items."

  Haral shrugged. "Fine with me. Are you needing some equipment replaced?"

  "That's right. It served me well, but I was pretty hard on it." Bloodwraith described exactly what he needed and received pieces of equal quality to the old ones immediately. He also sold off the fragments and raw materials he'd acquired in the crypt, not bothering to negotiate with Haral. The smith seemed to appreciate it and gave him slightly better prices.

  When he pulled out the heavily damaged steel breastplate, however, Haral shook his head. "That one is a mess and it looks like it was old to begin with. I could repair it, but it'd cost more than a new breastplate. I'd give you a silver and a half for the materials."

  "I'll take that, then. Can we look at the room of resold items?"

  "Help yourself." Haral shuffled over to unlock it. "I ought to just give you a key to the place."

  For a while they just examined the room filled with items. Bloodwraith immediately used his technique of checking rarity boxes for all of them, but he was disrupted by Meara's wide eyes. He'd forgotten how overwhelming the room could be, especially since she had no way of simplifying it.

  "There's often not much here," he explained, "but I've found some good items. I'm actually using a trick, though it's weird to explain..."

  "Yeah, I noticed you summoned an unusual number of boxes. What are you looking for?"

  "The whole system rates them based on their overall rarity, and it seems to be reliable enough. For example, all of these... they're listed as 'Uncommon' and they're nothing special. But this knife is a 'Very Uncommon' - I don't suppose it seems different to you?"

  Meara hummed to herself, turning the weapon over in her hands. "Maybe." Her fingers hovered randomly over the table, then she picked up a feathered stick seemingly at random. "Is this one even rarer than the one you showed me?"

  As a matter of fact, the box declared it "Rare." The item's description suggested that it was only useful for some sort of shamanic profession, so he had ignored it, but it was impressive that Meara had acquired a similar sense so quickly. He dismissed all the boxes to experiment. "How about now?"

  "Everything still feels different. It's difficult to put my finger on it, but I can tell the difference." Meara smiled over her shoulder at him. "So we're looking for anything that's a better price than we'd expect, right? I'll see what I can do."

  "I'm especially looking for items like this." He'd spotted something actually useful, so Bloodwraith picked up the pair of gloves to examine more carefully.

  [Leather Gloves of Strength

  Armor: 2

  Might +1

  Durability: 3/25

  Rarity: Very Uncommon]

  The price was an entire gold piece, which he was starting to think was standard for anything of this quality. He handed them over her Meara, who ran her hands over the leather thoughtfully while he explained. "What's unique about this one is that it increases my power directly. Just wearing this would be worth 20% of a Level. So acquiring a complete set of equipment of this power would be the quickest way to increase my overall capacity."

  "I think I can feel the difference. When it comes to this shop, I doubt I can improve much over what you can already see. But I'll keep my eyes open... you obviously can't afford to purchase your way to a set of equipment like this, so you're open to alternatives, I'd assume."

  Bloodwraith watched her for a moment, looked to the door, then quietly voiced his thoughts. "I'm surprised you're embracing this simple goal of power so quickly."

  "Yo
u shouldn't be." She looked back to him, eyes hard again. "Remember what happened to me in the Forest of Beginnings. The idea of being stronger than those adventurers, of bashing their heads in..." Meara smiled, filled with bitter malice unlike her usual smile. It should bother him, but...

  "Try on the gloves."

  "What? Wouldn't that be stealing?"

  "It's just another experiment. If they work, it would be good, but I'm curious."

  "I suppose it doesn't hurt." Meara slipped on the pair of gloves, then almost immediately frowned. Before Bloodwraith could ask, a box appeared over her.

  [This party member cannot use that item. Advanced equipment is restricted to adventurer-level characters.]

  "No luck. They're too stiff for me to move." Meara sighed and pulled them off, carefully setting them back down on the table. "I have a bad feeling that no matter how much I tried, I wouldn't be able to use these. On some deep level, the world has... labeled me in a different way."

  "Hmm. We could try to change that, but my intuition is that you're right." Since she seemed discouraged, Bloodwraith reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. "But don't forget, you hold the keys to raw power itself. That might just help me now, but I feel certain that in the future you'll be able to come up with more creative uses."

  Meara's eyes sparkled. "Oh, I intend to. But I'm happy to start by figuring out how I can help."

  They found a few items of potentially decent quality, but they were too expensive. In the end, Bloodwraith took only the gloves to Haral. He grunted and said it would take three days to get a leather worker and a mage to repair them, but that was adequate. When they left the shop they were an entire gold piece lighter, but that was one item found.

  In the market they purchased a pair of generic cloaks that would hide their identities at least a little. Though little could hide his height, there were many adventurers in the city who wore similar cloaks, so they no longer stood out quite so much. Once properly garbed, they headed back to the Adventurers Guild.

  Though he braced himself for some sort of heavy retaliation from Daek, the Guild looked the same as always. It seemed to be doing fairly good business for this time of the day. Meara looked around herself curiously as if this was her first time, which he realized that it might be.

  "Even when I was a girl, I always wondered how adventurers actually spent their time." Meara examined the crowds with an odd smile. "Seems to involve a lot of standing around."

  "It's not as exciting as it sounds, even in a city like Cresthaven."

  "So it's not always grand quests to defeat terrible monsters?"

  "The 'monsters' part is right. Not so much 'grand' or 'terrible.' " Bloodwraith led her to the wall of papers and gestured over them. "As you can see, a lot of it boils down to running errands. I spent a tenday doing requests like these and didn't make much progress. Maybe they would add up if you were willing to spend a lifetime at it, but we don't have that much time."

  "Quite a few errands here..." Meara walked beside the wall, her fingers trailing over the edge of the board. "Oh, look at this: a local shopkeeper needs a shipment of cureleaves. You'd better not collect any for that hussy!"

  "Ha. But in all seriousness, I'm not sure these are worth it. Perhaps we should pursue training and our... unique advantages." Bloodwraith didn't want to say anything more precise than that where they might be overheard based on what the boxes had warned at the beginning. Yet Meara didn't seem to be listening, wandering in front of the wall with her eyes unfocused.

  Abruptly she reached up and pulled one of the sheets of paper off the wall. She looked at it for the first time, frowned, then held it up to him. "What about this?"

  [New Quest!

  Clear a local cavern of its gnoll infestation.

  The quest can be accepted and turned in at the Cresthaven Adventurers Guild.

  Potential Rewards: Average]

  Not so different from most of the other quests, and the rewards were even described as "Average." Gnolls were brutish and weak creatures... relative to his past life. Now they might prove more of a challenge, though he thought he had come far enough that it wouldn't be suicidal to take them on. Bloodwraith shrugged and looked to Meara.

  "We could try it. But I assume you didn't pick this randomly?"

  "No, I just have a feeling about it..."

  "Then I suppose we can do another experiment." Bloodwraith took the paper to the desk to ask for more information, glancing back at Meara as she trailed after him. "Should we gather potions first?"

  "Oh, don't worry. It's a good feeling..."

  ~ ~ ~

  The drake's flames scorched Bloodwraith's back as he desperately leapt for cover. He hit the ground heavily and rolled, the blisters on his back shooting pain through the rest of his body. Though the drake hissed after him, climbing through the cavern with troubling speed, he was already off, leaping over a larger rocky outcropping and diving down beside Meara.

  "You have a good feeling, huh?"

  "I'm sorry!" Meara rummaged in her cloak and handed him another health potion, which he immediately drank. "How was I supposed to know the cavern would have a drake in it? Why wouldn't the person have requested to get rid of that instead of the gnolls?"

  "There will be time for that later - run!"

  Meara sprinted from cover into the nearest tunnel, leading them back to the outside. The drake noticed the movement and lunged after her. It would have caught up in a moment, if Bloodwraith hadn't been waiting for exactly that.

  He struck the creature in the side with the full force of a Sword of Rage and it dropped backward onto one leg, hissing angrily at him. But as he'd feared, even his best attack couldn't deal a serious injury to the beast's thick scales. Even with a full party and lucky blows, he didn't think he could take on a creature like that, not at his current level of strength.

  His only objective for now was strength, not victory. Bloodwraith retreated as the drake got back to its feet, hurling a burst of force into the creature's eyes. The drake closed its eyes against it, and in that time he fled into the tunnel after Meara.

  In a surprisingly short time he caught up to her, though he shouldn't have been surprised given the points he'd placed into his Quickness. But this wouldn't be fast enough. They still had several tunnels to travel through and he could hear the drake behind them, navigating the caves more easily than he'd expected.

  "Don't struggle," Bloodwraith ordered, grabbing Meara and throwing her over his shoulder. She obediently stayed there, not wiggling so that he could run. It felt like she weighed barely anything.

  "Flame incoming!" she called. Bloodwraith heard the drake crunch into their tunnel a moment later and dodged to the side, into one of the side caverns. A burst of flame scorched the cavern the next instant.

  Inside the cavern, a gnoll rose on its haunches, as surprised to see them as they were. Most likely the drake used them as food, but Bloodwraith wasn't willing to test that theory. Instead he expended the rest of the mana stored in his sword, the blow tearing the gnoll in half.

  As he sprinted from that chamber, he heard Meara whistle. "Wow, how often can you do that?"

  "I'm tapped. Is this really the time for banter?"

  "Hey, it's not like I can be very helpful from h - flame incoming!"

  He reversed directions again, canceling out his previous direction change. Again, the torrent of flame scorched the corridor behind them. According to his mental map, they were very near the entrance, but that wasn't necessarily safety. Even the Alpha Wolf in the Forest of Beginnings hadn't stuck to its territory, so he had no reason to believe the drake wouldn't follow them.

  "There's only the exit and that dead end, right?" Meara asked.

  Too winded to answer, Bloodwraith just grunted. As they passed the tunnel to the dead end cavern, he felt Meara twist and then heard something shatter. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw that she'd hurled a potion down the other pathway.

  A distraction, assuming the drake didn't see t
hem leave via the main exit. As soon as he broke out into daylight, Bloodwraith leapt to the side. Once there, he had to set Meara down and gasp for breath. His body ached and even the boxes declared that he didn't have any stamina left. Behind, he heard the drake roaring, but no flames burst from the mouth of the cavern.

  Meara jerked her head toward a nearby patch of bushes and glanced back to him. He nodded and rushed with her toward them as soon as he could. Though the drake might theoretically take some time to notice they hadn't entered the dead end, he decided not to take the risk.

  Grabbing Meara, Bloodwraith hurled them both into the heaviest part of the bushes. The branches scratched harmlessly at his armor, but he heard Meara muffle a grunt of pain. For a moment they hid there together in silence... then they heard a roar and a burst of flames lit the sky outside the bushes.

  The drake emerged from the cavern and rampaged around for a time, but fortunately the beast didn't appear to hunt by smell. That would have been difficult, since it constantly incinerated whatever was in front of it. They stayed hidden while it thrashed and roared around a large area for a time, then finally breathed a sigh of relief as it returned to the cavern.

  Even after that, they stayed hidden, but eventually Meara turned to him. "I... I really am sorry about this."

  "Don't be." Bloodwraith got up and parted the bushes to offer her an easier path out. "According to the boxes, the gnolls we killed were worth about 500 EXP. That's much better than a day of running stupid errands."

  "But I saw how close that came. We only have one life to live, after all..."

  "I'll admit, I don't like risks like this." Though he suspected that he should have smiled and encouraged her, Bloodwraith wasn't good at providing comfort. Fortunately, reality itself offered a little encouragement. "But the experiment proved something else: there's something behind your intuitions about quests. This one was definitely more than a few gnolls."