Spectres & Skin: Exodus

by RJ Creed

The first thing I found was a bloodied paper with scratchy writing just about still legible on it. The meaning wasn’t lost on me, though, and the gaps were easy to fill in.

  ‘Gregor,

  Found a job just PERFECT for you. If you get No One’s Burden you can sell it to any old dipshit for a dozen cartloads of gold. Split it half and half like last time? Map on back. Remember: if you keep the money for yourself WE WILL KNOW!

  Pleasant travels,

  A’

  Weirdly sinister note. I felt kind of bad for the guy — he had walked in here, unprepared, looking for the treasure all on his own. Didn’t even look like he was wearing armour. From what I could still see of it, anyway, which wasn’t much.

  I patted down the rest of his pockets, what remained of them, and found little else.

  “Check for jewelry,” Roark reminded me, making me jump. I hadn’t heard him approach. I did so, finding no rings but a simple gold chain. It had a very faint glow around it that I could see by squinting, so I inspected it

  Gold Chain of Snickersnee

  Fine Quality

  Snickersnee: +1

  I grimaced. More levels in my dagger skill — fuck I hated that stupid word — would be great, but I didn’t know if I wanted to wear something around my neck called the Gold Chain of Snickersnee.

  “Do you want this?” I asked Roark. He shook his head.

  “It’s yours, fair and square,” he said, and then smiled. What a nice guy.

  I tried to clip it around my neck but an error message came up.

  Only one necklace per neck may be worn at any one time.

  Well, if all I needed to do was get another neck…

  I didn’t want to give up the Def boost from my existing pendant so I simply pocketed it to hand off later. It wasn’t worth much to any of us, just a +1, after all. It’d be worth more to a vendor if I made it back to the city.

  “Let’s move on,” Ryken said, shifting from foot to foot and glancing back the way we’d come. His face was streaked with greenish goop, but I didn’t know how to tell him that without annoying him, so I let it lie.

  “Can you guys teach me the dissolving into the shadows thing?”

  Roark glanced at the entryway the same way Ryken had been. “Do you really think we have time?” he asked. “And do you have a Stealth of level 6 yet?”

  I looked at Ryken. “You’re Level 7 and your Stealth is at 6?” I asked.

  “I’m Level 8,” he corrected proudly; clearly that fight had poured experience points into him as well. “And yeah, it is. That’s pretty normal. You saying you have zero skills at level 6 or higher?” He shook his head and continued before I could figure out how to defend myself. “Fuck, you aren’t going to last long.”

  Roark shot him a meaningful sideways glance. “Matthew needs to keep his spirits up,” he said, sounding a lot like a father figure. I smirked as Ryken glared and kept silent. I resisted the urge to say something rude, and just strolled towards the next tunnel entrance. It took a second to find. The archway was hard to spot since it was curving back the way we came.

  “Is this the right direction, or are we missing something?” I asked quietly, aware that my voice at full volume bounced off the cave walls. “It looks like it’s going in the opposite direction.”

  “Looks to be the only direction, though,” Roark said.

  “Feel free to chisel through the far wall,” Ryken added. “See you at the end.”

  I shot the back of his head a sneer and entered the tunnel before them, strolling with my wolf at my heels and checking my stats. My mana was slow to recharge, even with that Intelligence bonus, but it was creeping back up towards 35%. That would be enough for a Bite now, I guessed, with my current Intelligence score. If it had gone to 33% that would be enough for 3 attacks per full mana bar, but there was no way of testing it without an enemy present.

  The pathway took me upwards again, until we were probably a little above ground level and twisting almost in a full circle. By the time I reached the next dug out cavern I was thoroughly turned around and wasn’t sure which direction I faced anymore.

  “What do you hear?” I turned and mouthed to Roark, who concentrated for a moment and then shook his head. He faded into the shadows at the edge of the tunnels and sidled along the tunnel walls, peering first through the archway and then pulling out his crossbow. I could only just make out the silhouette of his actions; it was almost as if my eyes didn’t really want to see him and they were rejecting the idea. But if I tried really hard, I could keep my gaze trained on his form. His arms raised, the crossbow readied, and he stepped through the darkness and searched the next cavern with his eyes, as my vision adjusted again to the new light.

  When I stuck my head closer, I realised that I didn’t need to adjust my vision as much as I thought, though, since there was a hole in the ceiling and bright afternoon sunlight filtered in, illuminating the dancing dirt and dust in the cavern.

  “This is it,” I heard Ryken whisper beside me. Roark still peered around the cavern. It was large, with a high ceiling, and huge sharp-looking stalagmites rising high from the ground.

  The walls were lumpy and deformed-looking, like the cavern had been originally dug out by a thousand tiny creatures instead of formed naturally over time. The tumorous far wall had two large metal manacles set into the stone roughly ten feet in the air, and that was the only sign that any humanoid creature had ever come this far into the cave. I wondered if they were intended for torture, somehow, and if so — just exactly what kind of beings needed that level of restraint? I didn’t want to find out.

  “What is it?” I whispered back.

  He pressed the map copy into my hand and jabbed at it. The ‘X’. “This is the big cavern. We just have to get across it and into the anteroom, which is on the right.” He kept his voice steady and almost inaudible, but I just about caught it.

  Roark hadn’t moved, his eyes flicking calmly left to right. He was biding his time, probably waiting for something to make an appearance. I licked my lips and looked from him to the cavern and then back again.

  “There’s nothing here,” he muttered, mostly to himself.

  “I am 99% sure that there is,” I said, low and urgent. “Don’t just—”

  “Like you know what’s in here and what isn’t,” Ryken muttered. “What level is your Perception skill at? It’s not close to ours, and we say there’s nothing in here.”

  Roark stepped from the shadows and gave an apologetic shrug to me, agreeing with the kid. “If it’ll make you feel better, we’ll run across to the treasure room,” he said.

  I was being patronised. Wow. Wow.

  No, not really; I expected it by now.

  “Fuck it,” I said. “Go ahead, then.” I gestured for Ryken to lead the way.

  “Matthew, he’s right,” Roark said kindly. “My Perception skill just hit 15 recently. There’s nothing in the room.”

  Nothing you can see.

  I looked back at the swirling dust in that sunlight. It could be from wind, sure, but I couldn’t feel so much as a slight breeze. And there was the fact that we were in the biggest area of the cave, right next to the legendary loot. A godly item, in fact.

  No One’s Burden? If that was what Gregor had been here to steal — and what we were here to claim — then it didn’t sound all that appealing, if I was honest.

  There was a boss in this room, anyway. I was only just about surer of my own name than I was of that fact.

  But Ryken looked me right in the eyes, rolled his, and then turned and strode into the cavern.

  Within just a couple of seconds I wished more than anything that I had been wrong, and he had been right. I would have far preferred to deal with teenage gloating than to deal with what happened next.

  The walls began to rumble in the cavern, and Ryken had the decency, at least, to turn around and look back at me with fear in his eyes. I swore and grabbed Roark’s elbow and rushed in to join him, because we didn’t sign up for th
is goddamn expedition to die alone. But also a little because the rocks in the tunnel we were in were beginning to crumble and shower us in dirt.

  Once out in the open we began to feel vulnerable and paranoid, and we formed an outward-looking triangle and walked in a tight circle, waiting with hammering hearts.

  The far wall was crumbling the most. I swallowed, my hands hovering over both of my blades, with no idea what was coming.

  Just then, the left manacle exploded out of the rumbling wall and I saw that it enclosed a basketball-sized wrist, with an even larger clenched fist at the end of it. Then the right manacle exploded out right afterwards, sending rubble thundering to the ground beneath and echoing through the chamber.

  Two trunk-like legs burst from the wall, and then a thick but sinewy torso. The head broke free from its stony prison last.

  “It’s a Guardian,” I gasped. But I didn’t need to tell the other two. They had hopped, both of them, into the nearest shadows and melted into them, effectively disappearing from the room.

  I was standing alone in the centre of an enormous cavern, opposite the yawning, petrified maw of a dead man three times my size. He punched clean through a nearby stalagmite and it was instantly obliterated, though I was relieved to find that that was because it was hollow; not solid rock. But then I was far less relieved when the enormous undead beast grasped what the stalagmite had hidden, and pulled the biggest sword, curved and sharp, that I had ever seen from out of the debris and wielded it high over his head. A shrieking war cry ripped from his throat.

  His HP appeared above his head and it was, appropriately, three times the size of mine.

  “Fuck fuck fuck,” I panted as the Guardian, whatever it was, launched into a full sprint towards me, its sword held high. None of that ‘big and slow’ bullshit; this son of a bitch was bigger, stronger, and faster than me. I scrambled backwards as fast as I could, desperate not to trip on rubble. “Guys?”

  Just as I said that, a large stone sailed from the dark corner of the cavern and hit the creature right in the temple, and then a crossbow jammed straight into its neck. It wasn’t much — the HP went down by maybe a total of 4%, if that — but it was enough that he paused in his full-on dash towards me and swung his head left and right, mouth still hanging open, to get a lock on his unseen attackers. In that spare second I inspected him, for all the good it was going to do me.

  Azhul Na’kur

  Level 22 Undead

  Ancient Warrior

  Hostile

  Did I read that right? First of all, the gigantic prick had a name, which meant he was heavy-duty, but he was Level 22? How was that fair? The rest of the dungeon had had normal, lower levels, and now this? I was going to die. And it was nothing to do with some goddamn stupid fake prophecy. I was so stupid for thinking that whole thing was real! It was probably just some generated lore — that didn’t mean it told stories of my actual demise. How could I have believed it?

  It was clear to me that I was going to die here and now.

  As Azhul lifted his sword high, I spotted that there was a full second or so where he steadied himself and strained his dusty muscles before it came crashing down onto the ground where I had been standing and gawping just moments before. I managed a deft forward roll before hopping up again and staring back at him — and at the fact that that dodge had lopped off a chunk of my stamina.

  My mana had only recharged so far to 65%, which sucked for me. I would bide my time, and run around and distract the thing while the others continued to fire shots from the shadows. Then when my mana filled up, I would command Moro to attack. If I could time this right — and I had battled many a boss in my time in The Afterlife — it was possible that I could survive this and take him out. In the time it had taken to leap out of the way of his first attack, and for him to yank his enormous sword from the stone floor, the others had fired another shot each, taking him down to just over 90% of his long, ornate health bar. It was better than nothing.

  For a second, as I ran to the other side of the cavern, I entertained the idea of attempting a Disarm on him, but considering it hadn’t even succeeded against the lesser Guardians at the beginning, it was probably wise that I didn’t try to get up close and personal.

  I had a theory that just one hit from that greatsword would wipe me the fuck out, anyway. Forever.

  As he raised his huge, angry sword above his head for the second time, I prayed to Titania briefly before making sure my timing was exactly right. I sprinted and rolled from his hit, feeling the ground behind my feet splinter into nothingness. I had timed it just a split-second wrong, so the juddering of the ground had me lose my balance and smack my chin onto the stone. That was 5% of my HP gone. Just relatively few more aftershocks from his ground pounding and I was a goner no matter how much of the brunt I avoided.

  I noted a serious problem in my strategy, though. The Guardian was down to 85% HP, I was down to 95%, and my stamina was knocking around the 75% range, already. I wasn’t going to make it very much longer before dodging his attacks at the last minute set me down to under 10% stamina and my life started to bleed away before my eyes.

  I stopped my sprint at the opposite end of the cavern and tried to force myself to really breathe and find a way to relax my muscles and regenerate my stamina as fast as possible. This was going to end one of two ways: my death, or his.

  The latter seemed improbable, at best. I continued my tactic: I dodged, which cost me approximately 7% stamina, and then I sprinted across the cavern at full speed, which took about 5% of my stamina. If that was about correct, just from eyeballing my green bar, then I was losing 12% stamina every ‘round’. I was managing to gain just one tick, or 1%, of HP back when I caught my breath at either end. My teammates also managed one or two hits per ‘round’, which averaged out like this: he was losing around 7.5% health (on receiving 1.5 attacks) for every 11% stamina I lost. At 0%, for either of us, the other would win.

  I had to alter this calculation in my favour, then. I didn’t want to change the boss’s behaviour, because we all knew exactly how he was going to act for now and that was a comfort, so I wasn’t going to call my teammates out of hiding and have them aggro him at the cost of their Stealth mode. So, if I was going to stay like this, I would continue to lose 11% stamina every round. At 55% now, I had five rounds left. Or, more accurately, I had four rounds left, since at 10% the drain would begin and even dragging myself away from him would deplete me until I passed out.

  Throughout four rounds, he would lose around … fuck, my mental arithmetic was pretty poor in stressful situations — he would lose around 30% of his HP by the time I was 4% stamina (or barely one dash) away from the 10% drain.

  I had to figure out how to turn the tables, and I had four rounds of twenty to thirty seconds to do it in.

  It was too late to turn back. It was too late to run away. It was just a shame, I thought, that all those people would have to come to terms with the fact that they had been wrong about me. That there was no chosen one.

  I’d used a cheat code, and I’d tricked this world out of its hero.

  If I could go back in time and change it, I would. I had no idea that Carl’s stupid idea would screw up everything. Not just my time in this world, but the lives of everybody who lived in Ilyria. Because they were real — they were all really real here.

  He yanked his sword from the ground, turned, and charged towards me again, clacking his teeth together in fury. His long, lank white hair hung in strands around his broad, withered shoulders. I was going to die. I’d really fucked up.

  But for the moment, I was going to fight, until I couldn’t anymore. “Moro,” I grunted. My mana bar had loaded back to full. I nodded to the giant and the wolf understood. I leaned against the cavern wall and panted among the rubble and the destruction. A crossbow bolt slammed into the brute’s shoulder as he thundered towards me, and then a stone hit him square in the ear.

  Just as he got to me and went to raise his sword, fury in
his eyes, my spectre launched and grabbed a hunk of his chest flesh and yanked it away. The skin hung from his ribs like a dusty tapestry and he roared in pain. That attack alone had chiselled off 10%, which was double the combination of projectiles. There was probably something special about the attack — either that magic was more effective, or perhaps that he resisted projectiles — that made it stronger. I doubted that Roark was the level he was at without having made his ranged attacks more powerful.

  The monster, to my surprise and delight, staggered backwards and shook his enormous head, lowering his sword. Did Moro’s Bite spell have a chance for stunning momentarily? If so, that could seriously turn the tables. And, just as I’d hoped, my mana ticked up by 1% and it looked like I still had two more Bites in me before I ran out of spell juice.

  It came down to this: Azhul was at a hair above 40% HP after that Bite. I was at just above 30% stamina. I had two more dodge-and-runs in me before my stamina started to drain with every small movement, and I inevitably died. My friends in the shadows could get him down 15% more in that time, and Moro could get him down 20% more. That left 5% of his health, which I could pick off myself by slashing at his legs with my sword every time I came close enough. I would probably lose a little health by catching his aftershocks, but if I timed it right, I would be fine.

  I could be fine.

  It might all be—

  Azhul had recovered, allowing me a precious extra 1% of stamina recovery, but he didn’t raise his sword for the same attack. Instead, he roared, and an ominous gold border appeared around his HP bar. At the same time, his eyes glowed gold and so did his sword. A couple of gemstones inlaid into the hilt sparkled with an ethereal, captivating light, and I gaped at the sight — what was I looking at? Magic?

  “Skin magic!” Roark confirmed from the shadows to my right, just before firing a crossbow bolt that stuck into his leg … but then bounced off and clattered onto the floor. A stone bounced off of the other side of his body at the same time and hit the floor. I saw no familiar, beautiful dent to his health. In fact … the bar began to slowly tick back up again. Nooo! “He’s invulnerable!”