by Kyle Johnson
He set his idle thoughts aside and focused on his target, a feeling of dread rising in him. The door was shut and, he assumed, probably locked, but if it was in the same shape as the rest of the building, a good smack or two with his staff would probably reduce it to kindling. That wasn’t his concern: his sudden worry rose from the innocuous-seeming pile of bone just to the left of the door.
Only one of them, he reassured himself. Better than the second level, at least. And, it’s not together. Maybe I could sneak past it in Stealth, get in, rescue whoever is in there… As he thought it, he realized it probably wouldn’t work. In most games, true undead didn’t use things like their eyes to see; they had an innate sense that detected life or magic or whatever, and unless you could hide that, you couldn’t hide from them. Usually, an undead had a specific detection radius, but once you were inside it, you were caught. That was why he had been moving so cautiously before: he wanted to spot the skeletons before he was within their detection range.
From how still the pile was, it didn’t look like he was too close, yet, but he had to assume that the door – and, probably, the entire building – was within the skeleton’s range. Even if he went in through a side or the roof, he would likely awaken the creature, and since it could probably get in as well as he could, he’d be trapped in that ramshackle building with a large, angry skeleton. No, I’m going to have to either fight it or lure it away from the building, he decided. I could probably lure it away: if I got it to chase me and manage to stay out of its detection radius, I would be able to double back and get into the building. Of course, if I did that and it came back here to resume its post while I was inside? Yeah, that would be bad.
He sighed as he realized he would probably have to fight the creature. Even if he won, though, the resultant battle would probably bring more of the small creatures running. He needed a way to win quickly, without attracting the attention of the smaller monsters. How, though, could he quickly win a fight with an opponent that he had only defeated by blasting it to pieces with magical explosives?
Actually, he corrected himself, that’s not how I beat it. I beat it by draining the skull of mana, not by taking apart the skeleton. I took it apart because if I wanted to get to the skull in the first place, the rest of it had to be in pieces. Suddenly, an idea struck him: the skeleton was already in pieces, wasn’t it? All he had to do was keep it that way, at least for long enough to drain the skull of mana.
He carefully went through his plan, making sure that he wasn’t missing anything. The last skeleton had pieced itself together slowly at first, and then the process sped up as it achieved a certain critical mass. If this skeleton behaved similarly, he could do this. If it didn’t, he would have to run and try to lure it away from the building, then lose it in the ruins. A drawn-out, pitched battle would be a loss for him, even if he won.
He slowly gathered the SP for a Mana Arrow, forming it completely and holding it, aiming it carefully at the center of the pile. The moment it released, he used Multishot to clone another arrow, both of which buried themselves in the bone pile before erupting, scattering bone fragments in all directions. At the center of the pile, Jeff saw a 3-foot tall skull whose yellow eyes had just flickered into life. The remaining bone around the skull began to shiver and slowly roll toward the skull, clicking as it began to connect, but Jeff wasn’t giving it that chance.
He hurled another cloned arrow at the bones surrounding the skull as he leapt from hiding and raced toward it. The bones that were already connected simply shivered slightly in the blast, but the remaining loose fragments were scattered. Jeff could see that the fragments were moving back toward the skull already, but he didn’t give the skull the chance to connect with them. He slammed his palm on top of the skull and immediately began to cast Mana Drain.
When nothing happened, Jeff started to panic. Then, he noticed the shimmer of his Mana Armor and mentally slapped himself: the spell needed direct connection, and the armor prevented that. Jeff could have dismissed his armor, but that would have been utterly foolish: if his idea didn’t work, he’d need the protection of the armor to survive long enough to run. Instead, he focused on his arm and managed to withdraw the shell only from his hand.
He felt the same resistance he had felt at first, but he continued to pull until he felt the first trickle of power enter his body. At the same time, he poured SP out into a ring around him, surrounding both the skull and him in a low ridge only about 2 and a half inches high. As he drew mana from the skull, though, he used it to increase the height of the ring, slowly raising it into a wall that slowed down the gathering bone shards. With his free hand, he swept his staff along the top of the wall, scattering bones before they could reconnect. Some of the bones were still joining the body, but the mass of them was now scattered, and as the monster’s mana roared through Jeff in a flood, fewer bones were making it over the wall, and the ones that were moved much slower.
He finally felt the flow of mana slow to a trickle, and he heard a clatter as the attached bone chunks began to drop from the batter-looking skull. When the flow stopped, Jeff dispersed his barrier and began pounding the skull with the butt of his staff, this time trying to aim for the existing fractures and widen them. It didn’t take him as long to reduce the skull to powder this time, and as the lights in the monster’s eye sockets died out, he stepped back, satisfied. The last time he’d faced one of these, he’d nearly been killed. This time, he hadn’t even been injured. All due to proper planning and execution, he thought with a smile. Well, and a bit of luck that the skeleton was so slow to form itself. And that there weren’t two of them; if there had been a second, I’d have been dead.
An idea came to him as he hefted his staff, and he quickly gathered up all the bone fragments he could find and swept them back into a semblance of a pile. It didn’t exactly look like the skeletons did in their resting state, but he hoped it was good enough to fool any of the small creatures who happened by. Satisfied, he went to the door of the building and tested the handle. To his surprise, it was unlocked.
The door scraped as he opened it into a small, dark room filled with a nauseating stench. Light barely peeked in through cracks in the badly repaired walls and roof, and dust motes swirled in those few beams of light. To his left, a large vat rested, filled with a murky liquid that he guessed was water; he wasn’t quite Thirsty enough to test it, though. Directly in front of him were a set of floor-to-ceiling bars spaced a few inches apart, seemingly with no door or gate through them. Behind the bars was what he guessed was the source of the stench in the room.
A gaunt, ragged-looking figure shifted in the gloom. “What are you waiting for?” a hoarse voice rasped, so dry it was barely recognizable as human. “Give me my rations and get your ass out of here. I’d rather sit in my stench than smell more of you edimmu.” What little of the being was visible was dressed in shredded rags, the skin beneath brown and streaked with filth. Its hair was greasy and hung well below its shoulders, looking black, gray, or dark brown in the dim light.
Jeff cleared his dry throat before speaking. “Uh, I don’t know what an edimmu is,” he said hesitantly, “but I’m not one of them. I’m a Tr…an elf. Aleen, actually. I’m here to help.”
The figure jerked at his words and scrambled to the bars on its hands and knees, gripping them and peering out. “An elf?” it spoke in the elven tongue, Jeff’s mind somehow translating her words. “How did you come here?” As the creature shifted its hair, a beam of light struck its face, and Jeff stepped back with a gasp. He recognized the elf before him.
Her name was Geltheriel.
Chapter 9
Jeff stood quietly for a moment, shocked. “I…I came through a door,” he sputtered at last. “Wait…how did you get here? You were just in the forest!”
The elf uttered a phrase that Jeff’s mind didn’t translate but that he guessed was a curse. “The Forest?” she hissed, her voice cracked and angry. “I’ve not seen a forest in two weeks, aleen! Who a
re you, and where did you see me?”
“I’m J…Aranos,” he caught himself at the last moment. I’m going to have to start calling myself Aranos even in my head, he thought absently, his mind whirling over his discovery. I keep wanting to tell people I’m Jeff. “I was in the Forest of Eredain. I saw you with patrols in the woods a couple of times.”
“That was a skin-walker, then,” she gasped, slumped to the floor. “The stronghold has been infiltrated. It may be too late already.”
“We can worry about that after,” Jeff – Aranos – replied. “First, let’s get you out of there. Is there a key somewhere?” He glanced around the room but saw nothing but the vat of liquid.
“Why would there be a key when there is no door?” the woman replied, her voice flat and emotionless. “My thanks for the attempt, aleen, but I am trapped here. There is no escape.”
“Yet,” Aranos corrected. She glanced up at him, her face annoyed. “There’s no escape, yet. There will be, though; I just have to figure it out.” He walked over to the bars and began to inspect them, looking for anything out of place. The bars, though, seemed just that: metal bars, a half-inch thick, placed perhaps six inches apart. I could try to blast them, he reasoned, but that would probably just kill Geltheriel and maybe bring the place down on me. I could try to pry them apart with my staff, but I’d need a longer lever for that to work. I could cut them, but I don’t think a sword would do the trick. What I need is a hacksaw, or a grinding disc…
He stopped, considering that last thought for a moment. He could certainly create a disc with his Forge Mana ability, and he could probably make one that had grinding teeth to let it cut through metal. The problem was spinning it: if he held the blade and made it move, it would probably only spin as fast as his mana platforms moved. Sure, that would cut the bars, but it would take a week or two, and he doubted they had that long. He could release it, like he did with the Mana Arrow, but that would just hurl it at the bars.
What I need is to hold it, but only in the center, he reasoned. Or, to have it spinning around a bevel in the center…although that’s probably too complex for the Spell. He shrugged mentally and formed a mana disc about 6 inches wide, trying to rotate it. As he guessed, it spun very slowly, far too slowly to be a cutting tool. He didn’t want to release his mental hold on the disc and have it fly out into the room; instead, he imagined slowly withdrawing his hold on it, sliding his focus inward toward the center of the disc. As he did, the disc’s rotation increased slowly, until when he was holding a space only an inch or so in diameter, it was whirling pretty quickly. Still, it was nowhere near fast enough to grind metal, and as it spun, he ran the math through his head. Let’s see, this thing normally moves at a bit over walking speed, so let’s say 100 feet per minute. That’s something like 60 rpm. I need it to go a few thousand rpm, though, so I need to reduce the part I’m turning by that same ratio. That means, really, I need to spin the tiniest point in the middle and nothing more, something a few hundredths of an inch…
He narrowed his focus further, finding it much harder to control the disc as he did so. He had to pump extra SP into the disc to keep it coherent and stop it from wobbling: he’d seen a saw blade shatter from a wobble, before, and it had been pretty scary. He didn’t need tiny bits of sharp mana slicing through everyone. As his point of focus grew more intense, the blade began to spin so fast it was nothing but a glow, at which point he decided it would be worth attempting.
“You might want to stand back at the far end of the…umm…enclosure,” Aranos told Geltheriel as diplomatically as possible. “I’m not sure if this will work, and it might fail, well, catastrophically.”
He glanced at the woman and found her staring at him in amazement. “What is this thing?” she croaked in disbelief. “And I cannot move to the end of the cell. It’s where I have been forced to… It is not pleasant.”
Aranos actually blushed at her words. “Yeah, okay, I get that,” he stammered, embarrassed, “but the thing is, if this explodes, it might kill you. So, you know, death or…unpleasantness. I guess you decide.”
The woman stared at him challengingly for a moment, so he simply shrugged and began to move the disc slowly toward the bars. It was incredibly difficult to control the entire surface from such a tiny point, and it took every ounce of his focus. As the disc finally made contact at the very top of one bar, sparks flew out with an ear-shattering scream of tortured metal, and with a hiss of pain, Aranos dismissed the spell, clapping his hands over his ears.
Geltheriel had done the same, dropping to her knees and scooting across the cell, heedless of the unpleasantness, and as the disc vanished, she uttered another elven curse. “You will bring all of the edimmu upon us!” she hissed in pain and anger. “And the gasha as well! You may have lured it off, but that racket will bring it back, and we will both be dead!”
“Uh, what’s a gasha?” he asked, rubbing his ears. “Oh, wait, is that the skeleton-thing outside the door? No worries there: I killed it already. So, I guess that means those little things all over the city are the edimmu?”
She stared at him for a moment in stunned disbelief. “You are telling me that you killed a gasha,” she replied flatly. “A creature that cannot be killed. A creature that regenerates from every blow and shrugs off all magic. And you killed it?” She snorted derisively and turned away from him. “It will return, soon, aleen,” she told him dismissively. “If you value your life, I suggest you flee and leave me to my fate.”
Aranos gritted his teeth, annoyed, but he decided to ignore the woman. He glanced at the bar and saw that his mana saw had cut into the metal. It was just a tiny gash, true, but it was a proof of concept. All he needed was to muffle the noise somehow. He could probably enclose the saw in a globe of mana, but then it wouldn’t be able to contact the metal to cut it. No, what he needed was a baffle: something like an old-fashioned muffler to mitigate the noise, rather than eliminate it entirely.
It took him another several minutes to imagine the series of convoluted, wrinkled surfaces that surrounded the blade without completely enclosing it. The surfaces were thin and airy, designed to bounce sound around and keep it from escaping. He rebuilt the disc in the center of it and tried to move the entire assembly back over to the bar, almost losing his focus and dropping the whole creation. He managed to barely keep a hold of it and pressed the whirling blade against the existing gash. Sparks once again erupted from the bar, but this time, the noise was merely uncomfortably loud rather than deafening. The blade slowly slid forward, biting into the metal with a whine. Ten seconds later, the blade erupted from the other sound of the bar with a soft clang. He guided it down to the base of the bar and repeated the process until the bar came free and fell to the floor with a clang.
He let the construct go with a sigh of relief. The baffling had helped, but the ringing had given him a trace of a headache and his ears were throbbing. Geltheriel rose to her feet, her eyes stunned. “How did you do that?” she whispered. “I have never seen that spell before. What sort of Wizard are you?”
“Well, I’m not really a Wizard,” he admitted. “I’m a Sorcerer. In any case, you should probably get out of there so we can get going. I don’t know how long it’ll be before those things – what did you call them? – before they come check on you.”
“True,” she muttered, stepping through the gap between the bars, looking up at the severed bar overhead for a long moment. Once through, she moved quickly to the vat of liquid and plunged her face into it. She remained there for a long moment as Aranos stared, unsure of what was happening. When she pulled her face from the liquid, she sighed in relief.
“The edimmu,” she replied. “This is what these creatures are called. We can discuss them when we are far from here. What is important is that they gave me only enough food and water each day to avoid death. I have been at the fourth level of both Thirst and Hunger for weeks.” She looked back at the water, her hair plastered over her face, and reached to the hem of her ragg
ed shirt, starting to lift it.
“Oh, hold on a second,” Aranos sputtered, his face again turning red. “Don’t do that…”
The elf woman stared at him flatly. “Do not misunderstand me,” she said coldly. “I am grateful for my escape. Yet, I am caked in filth and have a Diseased effect. I am going to use this water to clean myself; that was my only intent. You may turn away if you wish. I truly do not care at this point. Yet, I will be clean.”
“Oh, yeah,” he replied mollifyingly. “Totally. I’ve got notifications to check, if nothing else; I might have even leveled up from that gasha thing.” He smirked. “That’s not it, though. I’ve got the first level of Thirsty, myself, so if it’s okay, can I get some of that before you use it?”
She gazed at him again, her expression one of frustration. “Did you not bring an extra waterskin?” she snapped, frustrated. “What kind of fool enters a Fallen Land with only one waterskin? Fine, you may fill yours before I bathe.”
“I, uh, don’t actually have one,” he admitted shame-facedly. “I didn’t need one in the forest, and I didn’t really know where I was going when I stepped through the door to here.” He stopped and thought, rummaging through his pack. “Although, if you give me a few minutes,” he said, a little excited, “I can probably make one really fast!”
“You stepped through an arcane door, not knowing where it led?” she finally shouted, her patience exhausted. “What is wrong with you? You have no waterskin, you likely have no food, and now you wish to stop in the middle of the place I have been imprisoned for the past two weeks…to make a waterskin?” The last was uttered in a scream, her face red with her fury.
