The Time Master

by Dmitry Bilik

  I’d expected anything other than what happened next. The back of the hatchet fell to pieces. Traug stood there staring dumbly at the shaft he was still clutching.

  I must have completely zoned out. Logically, we had two solutions. We could either go back and tell all the others about the weird artifact, or we could carry on toward the Queen, kill her and retrieve the eggs.

  Still, I chose a third way. Ignoring common sense, I reached for the azure-colored rock and pulled it out of the wall.

  How strange. It actually felt lukewarm in my hands as if I’d picked it up from the bottom of a tropical sea.

  “What the-?” Traug said, bug-eyed, still nursing his frostbitten hand.

  I didn’t reply, transfixed as I was by the artifact.

  Which seemed to be looking back at me.

  Arthall (Divine Stone)

  It looks like you’ve already met.

  “Let’s go back,” I said, putting the rock into my bag.

  The artifact obediently sank into the inventory as if it had finally found its proper place. The summoning light it exuded became slightly stronger, as if begging me to hold it again. There was something dangerous about it, and at the same time enchanting. And the ease with which I’d procured it was admittedly frightening.

  Chapter 26

  AS EVERYBODY KNOWS, seagulls are the greediest creatures on Earth. So many children’s tears have been shed on the planet’s beaches over the ice-creams stolen by those flying gluttons. So many hotdogs have been snatched from their buns by those harbingers of the Apocalypse. So many boats have been plastered with the droppings of those screaming monsters which can eat anything from soap to French fries.

  But now those cute birdies could take a leaf out of Art’s book. Because the moment the girl had heard of my discovery, she turned into Gollum’s twin sister.

  “Come on, show me!” she demanded, forgetting all courtesy.

  I turned to look at Traug. He shouldn’t have mentioned the rock. Finders keepers. And now I’d have to tell them the whole story.

  Never mind. We were a team, after all.

  “Here,” I reached into the inventory and laid Arthall in my hand.

  “It’s so pretty... ouch!” Arts jerked her hand away. Her fingers turned purple, erupting in blisters.

  That’ll teach her the difference between taking a look at something and actually touching it.

  With her good hand, Arts reached into the bag and pulled out a small tin pot. Instead of a fancy rejuvenating cream as you would have thought, it contained some Elufrian ointment, no less.

  “When did you manage to get that?” I asked in surprise.

  “Does it really matter?”

  “Traug, would you come here, please? Arts will give you a heal too. You will, won’t you, Arts?”

  Our most important group member nodded without taking her eyes off her wounded hand.

  “And still, why can’t the rock do you any harm?” Harph asked, as if thinking out loud. “What did you say was in that message?”

  “I didn’t say anything,” I cast an unkind look at Traug who pretended he hadn’t noticed it. They were right in saying that a Korl is like a town crier. I didn’t mean Traug in particular, but you get the idea.

  “According to the message, I’ve already come across this rock somewhere before,” I said.

  Arts shrugged. “Bullshit. It must have been lying around here for centuries. And you’ve only just become a Player. Also, judging by the damage it deals, it’s indeed a Divine stone. And you just picked it up as if you handle such artifacts every day. You’re not a god, by any chance?”

  “I wasn’t this morning,” I said seriously, shaking my head.

  Harph shrugged. “Then I don’t understand.”

  “It might be that the guy whose Avatar Sergei received had indeed come across this artifact before. You never know, he might even have owned it.”

  “What kind of Avatar was it?” Traug suddenly asked.

  ‘Oh guys, give it a break,” I said. “An Avatar! Where would I get that?”

  Litius watched me intently, his feline eyes focused on me. Judging by the fact that I hadn’t received a new level in Lying, no one had believed me.

  “You don’t have to tell us if you don’t want to,” Arts said, confirming my suspicions. She’d just finished treating Traug’s hand. “We can discuss this wretched rock some other time. The Queen’s waiting.”

  “Finally some words of wisdom,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  That got me thinking. Apparently, a Divine Avatar had a memory of its own. That’s what gave me this feeling about the rock. And that’s why I’d received the message that I had: “looks like you’ve already met”. That seemed like the only logical explanation of my possible connection with Arthall. This was a Divine Stone, and I was pretty sure I wasn’t any kind of deity. Now Savior, or whoever had owned the rock beforehand, was a different story.

  I’d love to know how it had ended up here. Had it been discarded or hidden? And what could it do?

  Just as we walked past the room where we’d found the rock, a drop of water fell from the ceiling onto my nose, disrupting my train of thought.

  “The ice is melting,” I commented out loud. “Don’t you think it’s a bit quick?”

  We stopped. Arts looked up.

  Harph touched the wall. “It’s really melting. That’s because the artifact’s no longer there.”

  “We need to dash,” Arts said, turning to us. “All that frozen water has to come from somewhere.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “Litius, you stay here. You’re the fastest out of all of us. If something happens here, run and tell us. Come on, quick!”

  You’re on your way to receiving a new skill: Leadership.

  We hurried on. According to Harph, we didn’t have far to go: only another hundred and twenty feet or so. The tunnel continued to meander downhill like the thoughts of a corrupt official caught in corpus delicti.

  “Now why didn’t the rachnaids get frozen when they walked through that room?”

  “They’re not really susceptible to fluctuations in temperature,” Arts replied who in the absence of Litius took up his role as a walking Wikipedia.

  “They why haven’t rachnaids spread over all of Purgator?”

  “First of all, Purgator isn’t the only world inhabited by rachnaids. Just so that you know. Secondly, some Players do manage to kill them, only not during the Red Moon. And thirdly, they have their own way of propagating.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Listen here. Did I tell you how many eggs can a queen lay?”

  “A few hundred?”

  “So you see. Those few hundred eggs produce about fifty new rachnaids. One of them always becomes a female although I don’t know how exactly it works. Another one becomes the Alpha, and all the others, their minions.”

  “Did you say fifty? There were a lot fewer than that here.”

  “E-e-exactly,” Arts drawled. “The whole process of growing a new generation of rachnaids is based on cannibalism. First, the newborn devour the remaining eggs. Then, as they get bigger, they turn on their weaker siblings. By the time they form a fully grown group, all that’s left is the Queen, the Alpha and about a dozen famuli.”

  “Nice,” I said.

  “If everything goes well, the two groups split. The old one retains its territory while the newly born one wanders off looking for new feeding grounds.”

  “And if it doesn’t go well?”

  “Then the stronger group devours the weaker one.”

  “Our zoologists back on Earth would freak out,” I concluded.

  “It’s here,” Harph cut us short.

  The tunnel widened, forming a large cave. Now I really could believe that this was the rachnaids’ clumsy work. There wasn’t one stalactite left in sight: everything had been smashed and leveled.

  The Queen was sitting at the center of the room, surrounded by a clutch of oblong eggs. Then again,
she didn’t really deserve a capital “Q”. The rachnaids’ leader resembled a giant slug with a pair of long antennae and a broad fat body lined with hundreds of tiny feet. The body itself was protected by a chitinous shell.

  On seeing us, she emitted an ear-shattering screech and began to back off toward the far wall.

  Bastard! She was trampling our eggs!

  “Gosh it stinks,” Arts said, holding her nose.

  She was right. The air in the cave was unbearably fetid. I thought at first that it was the slug that had emitted these foul effluvia but then I saw a pile of rags and bones heaped up at the room’s center.

  “It looks like the rachnaids brought her whatever creatures they’d managed to kill,” Traug commented, unfazed. “So there might be some useful items in that heap of junk.”

  Harph cringed. “You seriously wanna go and dig through that? Rachnaids mainly kill newbies. I don’t think you’re gonna find anything interesting there.”

  “If you don’t look, you won’t find out,” Traug replied, drawing his sword. “But first we need to sort out the Queen.”

  Nobody stopped him. The slug was so nauseating that none of us had any desire to approach it. So if Traug had taken it upon himself to go and finish her off, so much the better.

  Unhurriedly he approached his squealing victim, took aim, then gave her slimy head an almighty whack. The blade glanced off, striking up sparks from the rocky floor.

  He took another swing but with the same result. The wretched chitinous armor and that Red Moon! It looked like I might have to get my hands dirty too.

  “Let me do it,” I reached for my knife, trying to suppress the nausea in my throat.

  Traug stepped aside without going too far, so that he could protect me if needed. He even pulled his shield out. Still, in the end he didn’t need it. Since I was a little boy, I’d had the habit of doing unpleasant chores as fast as possible. Three... two... one... zero!

  I sprang over to the Queen and buried my knife up to the hilt into her armored shell. The blade went through it like butter, splattering me with strange yellow slime. Was it her brain?

  The slug squealed louder, then fell quiet.

  You’ve liberated Virhort and its surroundings from the pillaging Rachnaids.

  +300 karma points. Current level: +480. You gravitate to the Light Side.

  Your fame has increased to 3.

  I shared the information with my team

  Arts laughed. “You’re a victor with a capital V!”

  “Meaning?”

  “It looks like Virhort’s Mayor had issued a mission to kill the rachnaids,” Harph explained. “And you’ve just completed it, by the looks of it, even though you didn’t take it on.”

  “Which means you’re gonna get zilch for it,” Arts concluded.

  “What makes you say that?” Harph said. “You can always negotiate. It depends on the levels of your Trade and Eloquence skills, of course. Alternatively, you could seek out the Player who accepted the task, and share the reward with them.”

  “Exactly my point,” Arts said. “Somehow I don’t think his Trade and Eloquence are any higher than 20. And I know this so-called Mayor. He’s a smooth operator. He won’t give Sergei a single grain of dust. Also, in order to negotiate, you need to know how much the mission was worth to begin with. So I shouldn’t hold your breath.”

  If the truth were known, I wasn’t upset in the slightest. True, I could have earned a few hundred grams of dust — or more, even. But I wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it. Not when I had all those precious eggs lying underfoot which could guarantee me the life of Riley for the next few months.

  I picked one up. It was soft and springy. Bigger than an ostrich egg, if you asked me. They could stuff their mission. I might have a chat with their Mayor anyway, just to learn the lay of the land.

  “Let’s just collect the eggs and get the hell out of here,” I said.

  We spread out and started filling our inventories with the loot. Excluding Traug who bent over the heap of rags, rummaging unsqueamishly through it. That was another thing I wanted to know. If you got killed by another Seeker or sentient being, you simply dematerialized, like that Chorul had done. But if you got killed by a monster, your body stayed put. Why?

  “Traug, sorry to spoil your fun, man, but let’s collect the eggs first. Then you can scavenge to your heart’s content.”

  He nodded and headed for the nearest clump. I was about to follow when I noticed a hilt sticking out of the heap of junk. You couldn’t mistake it for anything other than a weapon.

  Overcoming my disgust, I reached in and pulled out a short sword, about 25 inches long. Its double-sided blade was eaten through with rust. But the funny thing that had drawn me to it was the fact that its guard was shaped as two wide curved petals on each side. If you looked at it closely, it resembled the infinity sign.

  What was that if not sign from above?

  Black Imperial Katzbalger

  Origin: Roin Province

  Material: Roin steel

  Charmed to increase the damage dealt to positive-karma Players.

  Warning! The sword is damaged. -43% to damage. A good blacksmith might bring it back to its original glory.

  It looked like the person who used to own this Katzbalger hadn’t been a very nice individual. He’d probably been supporting the dark side. Still, the sword hadn’t helped him much against the rachnaids, had it? What he’d really needed was something with increased damage to insects.

  Almost unbeknown to me, my hand slid the sword into my bag. One moment it was there and then it disappeared. I walked over to Traug and started helping him load the eggs.

  We’d almost finished when I head Litius shouting in the tunnel. Soon he emerged, his tail twitching nervously.

  “It st-t-t-tarted! Th-th-the ice!”

  “The ice what?”

  “It’s m-m-melting!”

  “Let’s get out of here a bit quick!” I commanded.

  Traug eyed the eggs greedily. “There’re only a few dozen left!”

  “Even your life ain’t worth that,” Arts said, heading for the tunnel.

  “Come on, quick,” I nudged the recalcitrant Harph. Jan had already got his act together and was waiting next to Litius.

  Our way back was a struggle. Firstly, we now had to walk uphill. Initially, we tried to run but our Vigor plummeted, forcing us to slow down. Gradually I caught up with the more experienced team members who too had begun to slacken their pace. The worst thing was, the weight of my invisible bag was hindering me just like a real one would. I soon realized why when I saw a notice in my interface:

  Load: 365/570 lbs.

  That could land me a job as a courier, I suppose, seeing as I could now carry almost 600 pounds. But considering how uncomfortable I already was, even 400 lbs. might completely exhaust me.

  When we reached the artifact room, I finally realized what Litius had been talking about. The ice wasn’t just cracking: it was crumbling even as I watched, coming off the walls in large sheets. The water was now literally running off the ceiling.

  How strange. The ice just couldn’t have melted so fast.

  Still, the fact remained that we had to get out of here pronto. We all must have developed telepathy skills because we unanimously rushed out. A couple of minutes later, we’d already reached the slain Alpha.

  The mountain rumbled thunderously as if awakening from its century-long slumber. Water gurgled, filling the tunnel.

  “Come on, no point hanging about here,” I awoke the others from their stupor. “Let’s get out before the mountain comes crushing down around our ears. You can never tell how many tunnels there are and how they’re all joined up.”

  Still, I didn’t have to be so apprehensive. Less than an hour later, we finally emerged from the shaft into the light of day which was admittedly rather orange.

  I was happy as a pig in shit. Happy to re-enter the fresh air which I’d missed so much underground. Happy to see
this stupid moon which remained crimson even at daytime. I was even happy to see the large billygoat which was staring at me, his tiger’s head crowned with two sharp twisted horns.

  Wait a sec. What the hell was this animal supposed to be?

  Antalope

  ????

  Unruly