* * *
“No way!” the old orc shot out unequivocally when I asked yet another question.
“But I have full access!” I exclaimed yet again.
“I know!” the Armory Master answered like a windup toy. “But your access does not apply to the citadel’s strategic reserve. I cannot simply give up the last of our mana and energy crystals to some Johnny-come-lately! They are reserved for faction members only and exclusively with the magister’s permission!”
Dobbess was right. The old man was a tough cookie. I had already wasted a whole hour trying to buy something worthwhile at the armory, but so far all I’d gotten was a nervous tick.
“Alright,” I sighed, trying to calm down. “Then what can you sell me?”
“All this,” the orc eagerly made a half turn and pointed at a long set of shelves weighed down with all kinds of junk.
It would be easier to say what wasn’t there. Flasks, phials and bottles of various shapes and sizes. Some differently colored little rocks and crystals. Bags, roots, dry grass, claws, feathers and other trash like it. There were lots of cutting and piercing “tools” of abysmal quality as well, and still the lowest level among them was five.
“But I’ve already looked at all that!” I exclaimed, losing the last shreds of my self-control. “None of this works for me!”
The orc just threw up his hands indignantly and started telling me about all his “treasures” in a monotone voice. About their use and consequence.
In my mind, I understood that I was being treated this way due to lack of reputation with the chaos faction. And that the spirit’s amulet, which I handed to the old armory master, was worth about as much an anti-rheumatism balm. But I didn’t give up:
“Got any growth spheres?”
“Never heard of ‘em,” the orc answered right away and added mockingly: “Anything else?”
I understood that the old man probably knew about my conflict with the magister. He was just drawing out the clock.
“Well alright,” I said, clenching my teeth angrily. “I’ll take another look. Maybe I really will find something useful.”
“I’m sure you will,” said the orc, throwing up his wrinkled old hands with a false kind-heartedness in his voice. “There are a lot of valuable specimens there!”
“Sure,” I muttered, walking past the shelves of bird bones and feathers. As if it wasn’t enough that they were useless to me, nothing was below level seven. Little bastard!
Wait… What’s that? I stopped dead in my tracks. Between the shelves and racks, I saw a wall peeking out with strange features.
“What’s back there?” I asked.
“Where?” the orc kept trying to play the fool.
“Behind the racks,” I didn’t give up.
“Ahhhh,” the old man drawled. “That’s a wall.”
“Doesn’t look like it,” I answered. “I don’t think it’s just any old wall. I’d like to take a peek.”
“But…” the orc tried to object.
But I cut him off:
“Let me remind you I have full access. You have the right to refuse to sell me something, but you have to show me everything. Right?”
“Yes…” the tricky armory master rasped out despite himself.
“Then show me,” I nodded at the shelves.
“If you say so,” the orc shrugged and suddenly said in a totally decent tone: “Even the magister cannot access what’s behind that door.”
“All the more reason to show me,” I hurried him along. In the meantime, I was surprised not to hear the old song and dance about the citadel’s strategic reserves.
Despite his scrawny and somewhat frail constitution, the old man made pretty quick work of the heavy racks and didn’t even break a sweat.
“Well, go ahead and look,” the orc invited, his arms crossed on his chest when the stone door in the wall was cleared of junk. “But fair warning: I don’t have the keys to that door and I never did.”
Then, not wasting time, I hurried to avail myself of the invitation. Walking right up close to the wall, I started looking. I tried to ignore the orc’s unhappy murmuring and sighs. Not even a minute later, I’d found what I was looking for. A small cavity at chest level. I swept a bit of the dust off it and looked closer. Inside the oval indent I could make out a curious symbol shaped like three parallel wavy lines.
“That is the ancient symbol of chaos,” the orc commented pompously on my discovery. “No one has ever…”
Before he could finish, he trailed off. The thing was that at that exact moment my finger completed the familiar blood-droplet procedure. The system informed me that my blood had been tested and the result was positive.
The contours of the door in the wall flickered with a light blue glow and I got approval to step inside.
“See, and you were grumbling,” I said calmly to the orc, who was thunderstruck, and walked through the doorframe.
Inside was a small room of twenty-by-twenty feet with a hexagonal marble column in the middle. From floor to ceiling it was lined with honeycomb-shaped compartments. Most of them were empty, but a few of them contained scrolls, dark lilac crystals and fiery red pearls.
Feeling a squadron of ants start marching up my spine, I started looking. I decided to start with the pearls… There were just twelve.
When I took one of them in my hands, a message appeared before my eyes to say that, as a carrier of the Friend of Chaos amulet, I had been given the opportunity to purchase this pearl for five hundred chaos tokens.
Chaos Pearl.
― Type: Magical transformation.
― Concentration: High.
― Rarity: Epic.
― Description:
― A Chaos Pearl, harvested from the depths of the Great Ocean of Chaos. For several centuries, it stored up the magical energy given off by the waters of the ocean. Those who dare to use this pearl can raise the level of one of their transformations by 10 points at once.
― Warning!
Always keep in mind that excessive and unchecked use of Chaos pearls has consequences! Beyond transforming external appearance, the Chaos energy contained within the pearl can overwhelm the conscious mind.
― Pearl disappears after activation.
― Weight: None. Takes no space.
My first impulse was to buy the whole dozen right then and there, but I got myself together. I needed to take a peek at the other scrolls and crystals first. There were just five of the former and eight of the latter.
While I read through the description of the first scroll, I breathed a loud sigh. How nice that I didn’t waste my six thousand tokens on pearls. Every scroll was worth two thousand tokens.
Chaos Talent “Quick Reflexes.”
― Type: Magic scrolls.
― Rarity: Epic.
― Description:
― One of the Chaos Talents from the Quick Reflexes branch of the Mind characteristic.
― Effect:
― Reduces the cooldown time for chaos spells/magical abilities by 3 times.
― Reduces the cooldown time for other schools’ spells/magical abilities by 2 times.
― Requirements:
― Mind – 15.
― Note:
― Scroll disappears after activation.
― Weight: None. Takes no space.
The other four scrolls were also talents. Two from the mind branch and two from strength. There wasn’t enough time to read and make sense of them so, without thinking, I dropped ten thousand tokens on them right away. Furthermore, the crystals proved to be confinement crystals, which I could transfer chaos spells into. And more precisely Chaos Shield. The “confinement” came at a cost of two thousand mana points while using it later would run me another four. In the end, it was a thousand more than if I had activated it without a crystal. But that wasn’t the cool part. With seven such stones all containing shields, I could activate them one after the next without worrying about cooldown time between
usage. All that mattered was having enough mana.
Each of those crystals cost a thousand tokens. I considered it briefly and decided to buy them over the improved transformations. The memory of the huge boulders crushing in on me from all sides in the Queen of the Draks’ lair was just too fresh. Being able to use eight chaos shields in a row without worrying about cooldown time would bring up my survival chances a good deal. All that remained was to figure out whether it would be possible to activate them at once and whether they could all work cumulatively.
I used the remaining two thousand tokens to acquire four pearls and headed for the exit. Time to get going.
When I crossed the threshold, I just about slammed into the orc. He was clearly groping around on the wall with his hands to try and figure out how to open the strange door.
“Well, what’s it like?” he greeted me with a question.
“Not too interesting,” I waved it off and headed to the armory exit.
“And what, don’t want the mana crystals anymore?” the orc tried to pressure me.
“Nope,” I responded, trying to make my voice sound casual.
“Perhaps a trade then?” the orc made his final attempt. “I give you crystals and you give me what you took from that room. I promise it will work out in your favor! What do you say?!”
Once at the exit, I turned around and looked the old swindler right in the eyes. Had he forgotten about the citadel’s strategic reserves so quickly?
As I stepped through the doorframe, I gave a smirk and shouted over my shoulder:
“No way!”
Outside, Pinebogey and Dobbess were waiting for me with smiles on their faces.
“I don’t know what that was,” the laughing goblin said. “But I liked it something fierce.”
“Ready?” Pinebogey asked me, adjusting the straps of his backpack.
I glanced at the goblin. There was an impressively large leather knapsack on his back as well.
“What about you?” I asked. “Are you ready? And I don’t mean have you packed enough changes of underwear. You do understand, after all, that as soon as you step through the portal with me, there will be no going back, right?”
From an outside perspective our conversation probably looked comical. A little kid, a zero, talking to a Primordial and goblin mage like they were a couple of brainless adolescents. And in their turn, they were not mad at the boy for his impudence. In fact, with grave looks on their faces, they were hanging on his every word with important nods.
“Ever since we saw the Heart of the Forest, our world changed,” Dobbess said unexpectedly and, proudly raising his head, continued: “If anyone asks what’s better – to take part in creating something truly great or to vegetate on the edge of the world for decades – I’ll always choose the path of creation! I can see you’re surprised, Highlander. Heh… You’ll have to bear with me! Dobbess, Shadow of the Swamp Fox Clan has more surprises in store for you!”
While we walked to the portal, we were followed by malicious looks, but they were in no rush to attack.
Surprisingly, the portal room was empty even though I was expecting someone to try and stop us until the very last second. When I finally stepped over the line, I was most worried that my allies would be brought somewhere different than me like last time. But the Labyrinth accepted us with no surprises.
In the middle of a huge cave, we traded glances. Dobbess sneered and showed us his wrist. The Chaos mark was missing. He made his decision. Pinebogey’s marker meanwhile was glowing with a pure emerald light. Not like last time. I took a fleeting glance at the woodsman and surprisingly realized that he had also changed a good deal over the last few days. He looked several years younger. He definitely had less gray hair.
He wanted to say something, even raised a hand, pointing down a tunnel but wasn’t fast enough. A sudden mishmash of wolf howls wailed up from the bowels of the Labyrinth.
Chapter 14
“I WAS EXPECTING something like this out of the magister,” Dobbess cringed. “Her hounds were here all that time waiting for us. The snakefolk probably didn’t turn down the chance to hunt either.”
The woodsman and goblin glanced at me searchingly.
“Eric, I understand why you’ve been taking so long to tell us the best place to plant the Heart of the Forest,” said Pinebogey, looking me straight in the eyes. “But now, both Dobbess and I have no way back, so this would be a great time to tell us where you intend to go next.”
“Depending on our destination, we should know which portal to choose,” added Dobbess, wincing at another round of distant howling. “And the sooner we leave the labyrinth, the less chance they’ll have to hurt us.”
“The Stone Forest,” I answered shortly.
There was no longer any reason to hide it. These two had proven we were in the same boat when they went against the magister.
My companions’ faces grew noticeably sad. Seemingly, that was not the answer they were expecting to hear.
“Don’t think that I’m casting aspersions on your choice,” Pinebogey started with slight skepticism in his voice. “But why the Stone Forest precisely? Wouldn’t it perhaps be better to make for the Golden Grove? To the elves?”
“I can only imagine how happy their knife-eared Prince will be when we show up with three Great Forest seeds,” Dobbess chuckled and smiled dreamily.
Hm… Looks like they’ve already figured it out. I wouldn’t say giving the Heart of the Forest to the elves is a bad idea. But the problem is that I personally don’t like it. I have other plans.
Nodding at the goblin’s remark, Pinebogey started to speak:
“Eric, don’t get us wrong here. Right now, the ruler of the western elves is the only ruler in our world that could provide us safe harbor. And when I say ‘us,’ I am most of all referring to the seeds.”
“He’s talking sense,” the goblin supported the woodsman.
I frowned slightly. My will allowed me to sometimes recognize when someone was not speaking their mind. I wonder what you’re really thinking.
“Are you trying to say that you refuse to become keeper of the Heart of the Forest?”
Pinebogey winced and rubbed the back of his head.
“Listen, Eric… I’m just a minor primordial and I left the forest a long time ago. Plus, after that I tarnished my reputation by fraternizing with the forces of chaos. The elven prince though is one of the elders. Who better deserves the privilege of reviving the Great Forest?”
There it is! Lack of confidence in his voice, sadness and some sort of clammy resignation. It seems he hasn’t believed in himself for a long time. Not on my watch! Today I’m gonna light a fire under your ass.
“You afraid?” I asked, adding a droplet of mockery to my voice.
Pinebogey clenched his fists. The look in his animal eyes grew harsher. That’s more like it. Unexpectedly, I caught myself thinking that I was manipulating a Primordial’s emotions. If my momma could see me now, she’d have a stroke. This is like sticking your hand in a dangerous predator’s cage. But my momma is dead, and I have myself been more dangerous than any predator for quite some time.
“Everyone who ever dared call me a coward is long dead!” Pinebogey barked.
“Then what’s the matter?” I asked directly.
The fire in the woodsman’s eyes went out. He lowered his head.
“I am not worthy of the honor.”
“The amulet didn’t seem to think so,” I objected and added harshly: “And what makes you two so sure I’d agree to give the seeds to the elves all of a sudden?”
“But the elven Prince…” the goblin tried to object. The look on his face spoke to the fact he was not expecting such a rebuke.
“What about the elven Prince?” I interrupted him. “I didn’t see him taking down the Black Widow! The Great Tree gave these seeds to me. They are my reward. And I am not planning to just hand them to some stuffed shirt from the Golden Glade. I don’t remember the elves ever doing a
nything for me. As a matter of fact, they have been living in their closed-off little world for ages, not giving a crap about anyone else. And I don’t blame them. It is their right, just as it is my right to use my reward how I see fit. These seeds harbor a great Power! So now you two, given you’ve already got it figured out for me, explain why exactly I should share this power with someone who didn’t even raise a finger to obtain it?”
“It’s for the good of the young Hearts of the Forest,” said Pinebogey, but I didn’t hear firm confidence in his voice.
Labyrinth of Fright (Underdog Book #5): LitRPG Series Page 15
