Then, a great shredding noise filled the air as the fabric of reality itself ripped, and the world around the mercenary devolved into madness.
People broken and distorted. Horses merging with their riders. Infantrymen turning on their own troops and screaming as they killed. Men turning into babies. Babies turning into old men. Darkness. Light. The sun rising and setting at the same time. Pure, unfiltered chaos.
An agony burst inside the mercenary that was far beyond a wound of the flesh. Something inside him was being ripped away, and to his horror, he saw his Tome appear in the air before him. The book spun as it pulled away from him, and while the mercenary could tell the same thing was happening all across the battlefield, his eyes were locked onto his own book. Something was tearing the mercenary’s Tome away, and if he didn’t intervene, if he let his Tome be taken from him, his soul would be gone forever.
The mercenary propped himself up with one hand and grabbed the handle of the shortsword protruding from his gut. Wrenching the blade halfway out, he stifled the pain and pushed the hilt down toward the ground.
“I die free,” the mercenary spat. Then he pulled, driving the blade up under his ribcage and into his heart.
“What the hell!” Mark shouted, jerking back to reality as he dropped the sword to the ground. Before he could process what he’d seen, the spectre burst out of the gloom, its warped, shifting shape racing towards Mark the moment it caught sight of him. With no chance to run, Mark reflexively raised his makeshift staff like a shield. As though a rough branch he’d picked up off the forest floor could do anything to ward off a tormented and vengeful soul.
The ghostly apparition flew straight through Mark’s arm and grabbed Mark’s head with its outstretched hands. Immediately, Mark’s body started shaking, and he dropped to his knees. This wasn’t like a seizure. Instead, it was as though his body was being wracked by some primal force, and a chaotic stream of visions raced through his brain with such density that he nearly missed the pulling sensation at the centre of his being.
If Mark hadn’t experienced that vision, he wouldn’t have known that what he was feeling was his Tome being forcibly extracted from his body. Nor would he have known the reason behind the desperate hunger that lurked within the spectre’s eyes.
“NO!” Mark roared. With a supreme effort, he forced his shaking muscles to lock down, pushing this invading entity away from him, away from his mind. “Get out of my head!”
At first, the creature didn’t budge. But something inside Mark shifted. The shaking of his muscles became a resonance, building in a power that transformed his physical movement into a wall of mental force that he threw at the creature, pushing it away. The apparition wailed as it inched away, its arms stretching out and trying to maintain a grip on Mark’s head, but Mark never ceased in his assault.
More spectres emerged from the gloom, circling the combatants but unable to get closer than a few metres, the force of the battle keeping them at bay. Meanwhile, Mark kept pushing, forcing the spectre away one centimetre at a time until it was completely free of Mark’s head. He wasn’t able to gain complete freedom, however. Unable to force the tortured soul beyond the extent of his arm, the spectral form continued to engulf Mark’s staff and the hand that grasped it. Even that small touch was enough to drain Mark, and he knew that this battle couldn’t continue forever. What he needed was a way to win.
Plunging his other hand inside the spectre, Mark gripped his staff with both hands and wrenched focus off himself and onto the apparition in front of him. Clamping down with his will, Mark mentally embraced the being’s wildly shifting form and drove down on it, forcing its mad shifting to slow.
The apparition went wild, flailing in panic, but Mark didn’t relent. That resonance inside the spectre felt familiar, as though it echoed something inside of him. Yet as much as the resonance felt like a part of Mark, what was inside the spectre felt alien, something that had been forced upon the creature, fighting and distorting it into the twisted apparition it had become. While Mark didn’t like the idea of kinship with a force that could twist souls into the haunted denizens of the fog, he knew that whatever tiny edge he had couldn’t be wasted, no matter the implications.
Left with no alternative, Mark grabbed onto that resonance and hammered it down on the spectre.
The scream that cut through the fog nearly deafened Mark, filling the air with a tormented wail as the spectre’s very being started to shred under Mark’s onslaught. From every split that appeared in the fibre of the creature’s soul, a massive power started to leak out, filling the air with crackling energy. Mark soon realized that even if he won this battle, if he didn’t do something about the force that was building in the air, he would end up killing himself regardless.
Desperately, Mark cast around for somewhere to direct that power. His first inclination was to use the ground as a sink, bleeding it off like surplus electricity, but he met with such resistance that it was more like pushing electricity through rubber. He tried again with the discarded arms and armour of the long-deceased soldiers but was met again with the same rigid resistance.
With all other options exhausted, Mark attempted to focus that surplus power on the last thing in the world he would have thought capable of handling such force: His crude wooden staff. To Mark’s shock, the wood soaked up power like it was created for that purpose, absorbing so much of the spectre’s fracturing form that it began to hum beneath his hands.
With his prospects for survival renewed, Mark once again bent his will against the creature before him. At some point, the creature’s attempts to attack Mark transitioned into an effort to flee from him, but Mark was too lost in the battle to care; obsessed with the destruction of this creature that had tried to annihilate his very being. The spectre’s form began to distort as it broke apart, its shape stretching out until it completely surrounded the staff into which its essence was being drawn. Mark could sense the battle drawing to a climax, smell the ozone burning the air, feel his hands burning from within the writhing fire of the spectre’s destruction. Then, suddenly, there was a snapping crescendo and an abrupt blast of power as the creature exploded into a swirling miasma that crackled in the air. It lingered, then collapsed into Mark’s staff, searing his hands as it sunk into the rough wood with a crackle of finality that left the staff thrumming with energy.
The unshaved bark beneath Mark’s hands began to blacken and smoulder. He looked at the staff in horror as it started to vibrate, the power too much for a simple wooden branch to handle. Somehow, Mark needed to release that excess energy, but he had no idea how. All he knew for certain was that if he didn’t find a way, he would be destroyed.
In a fit of desperation, Mark raised the staff above his head and drove the butt into the ground, forcing all of the power out of the staff.
It was only at the last moment that Mark remembered how unreceptive the ground had been to this kind of power. He also remembered what happened when you forced too much electricity through rubber.
“Shit.”
The earth buckled beneath Mark’s feet as a spiderweb of cracks appeared in a 5-metre radius around him. Through every crack, a blistering white light shone forth, illuminating the swirling dome of fog in an aurora of fluorescent glow. Then the web collapsed, taking Mark with it.
All was chaos. One moment Mark was falling, then he was on his feet. Then he was falling again, only sideways. Then he was on his feet again. One of his hands had 11 fingers, while his other was purple. Everything was twisted and changing, and with every movement, he felt the same wrenching he had felt in that long-dead mercenary’s vision, only twenty times worse. What the hell was happening?
Mark’s motion stopped—though the shifting of his body didn’t—and he found himself standing in a rock tunnel that extended around a corner into darkness.
No, not darkness, Mark thought. There was a dim multi-hued light ahead. With no other option, he moved towards it.
As Mark rounded the corner,
he discovered something that nearly destroyed his mind.
A distorted, twisting ball of power hovered in the air over a gigantic chasm. Its size defied comprehension. It could have been one metre wide or a thousand—Mark’s brain was incapable of processing the scope of the thing. White light arced like electricity around the object, and occasionally a band of light would lance free and hit something, twisting and distorting it into a thousand different possibilities before the object settled on a form completely at random. The result was a gigantic cave covered in all manner of colours, plants, substances, slimes, and even animals, although most of those were distorted messes that clearly hadn’t survived for long.
Once again, it was beyond Mark’s comprehension.
Despite the overwhelming oddness of the thing, something drew Mark to that orb of power. He couldn’t quite explain it, other than to say that it was similar to the resonance he had felt with the spectre, within himself, but on a massive scale. He didn’t know whether he should be speaking to the thing or running away from it, but he found himself drawing closer regardless.
Then Mark became aware of a sliding sensation, as though he were on a moving walkway. Looking at the ground beneath him, Mark realized he was moving toward the wildly fluctuating orb of blue power, but not of his own volition.
It was too much. Dropping his staff, Mark turned and tried to sprint away, but it was useless. Regardless of his efforts, Mark continued his inexorable slide towards the orb and its chasm.
Now panicked, Mark redoubled his efforts, only to trip when the back of his heel clipped a rock and he toppled to the ground. He rolled onto his stomach and clawed at the stone with his hands, but all he managed to do was tear his fingernails off and leave bloody stripes in his wake as he was dragged towards the ledge. When he finally did reach the lip of that fantastic chasm, he braced himself for a gut-wrenching drop, only to discover that instead of falling, he was pulled up into the air, hovering as he continued to be drawn towards that twisting orb of power.
A shock of horror went through Mark when he realized what was happening. Then there was a bright light, a blast of acceleration, and he disappeared inside the orb.
Angela pushed her way through yet another patch of dense brambles, stumbling over an unseen root and nearly face-planting into the dirt. Leaves and thorns broke off the plant and stuck raggedly to her clothes, but she ignored them, instead taking a moment to spit out cobwebs that had ensnared her face.
“Ugh!” Angela groaned. “This is just the worst!”
She dragged her fingers through her hair, hopelessly tugging at the knots that had formed over the last two days as she made her way to Palmyre. Or tried to, at any rate. She should have been able to follow the river, right? That should have been easy? Nope. Riverbanks didn’t like to be nice and gentle for the entirety of their length. Instead, she’d been forced inland on more than one occasion. Which meant that instead of a relatively clear space by the river, she had to deal with the dense, bramble-filled, thorny-assed, ankle-twisting, spider-web-in-the-face crap that grew inland, where everything wanted to either scratch her eyes out or hit her with some kind of contact-irritant that made her skin itch and burn like hell. At least she’d picked up some kind of Hiking Skill and an Endurance point, but so far it didn’t seem to do a hell of a lot.
Angela looked around to get her bearings, in the process spotting some tall green stalks growing near a tree stump.
She sighed in resignation.
“Better than nothing,” she muttered. Getting down on her hands and knees, she clawed at the dirt until she had exposed enough of the tuber to pull it free of the ground, then jammed it into her belt pouch without looking at it. She preferred to put it out of her mind until she was forced to eat it. Not that the thing was hideous; it was just that looking at it would make her think about the taste, and that would inevitably lead to dry heaving. Even the rabbit that tipped her off to the plant’s edibility hadn’t looked like it was enjoying the experience.
A noise came through the forest, causing Angela to pause in her digging. It sounded like someone slowly letting the air out of a balloon, layered over the cracking and rustling of brush being broken. Given that this was Arenia and balloons were presumably not a thing, combined with the plaintive air to the noise, Angela realized it was the sound of an animal in trouble.
For a moment, she considered not going to help. Gotta stay alive, right? But then she remembered that she was a Druid. Or would be. Maybe. If things turned out. Regardless, if she was going to pursue that path, she could hardly ignore the sound of an animal struggling in the woods.
“Fine, fine, I’m coming. Hold your horses,” Angela muttered. She pulled the last tuber out of the ground and shoved it into her belt, then made her way through the dense foliage to the source of the noise. More brambles got caught in her hair and clothes, but she gritted her teeth and kept moving forward, trying to ignore the godforsaken things.
When Angela finally came upon the source of the noise, she discovered that it was a deer in the middle of a clearing, its foreleg caught in a hunter’s trap. The leg was pretty mangled from all the struggling, and even though the trap was likely meant for smaller animals, it had done enough damage that the deer would probably die of sepsis if it escaped. Or a predator would eat it, more likely.
“Hey there, little buddy,” Angela said in a soothing tone. “Everything’s going to be okay, yeah? You just let me come over there and help you.” She made her way slowly across the clearing toward the deer. Its tail twitched, and it looked at her nervously, but it didn’t move. Once Angela was close enough, she slowly got to one knee and bent to investigate the trap. It wasn’t too complicated, kind of like what you would see in a cartoon. Before long, she worked out how the thing operated.
Using her body weight, Angela pressed down on the levers to either side of the trap's jaws. With the metal no longer binding its leg, the deer gingerly removed its injured hoof and hopped tentatively away from the trap, completely unable to put any weight on the injured limb.
“Easy there, fella,” Angela said. “I’m going to give you something special to close that wound right up, okay?”
Angela removed a sprig of mistletoe from her pouch and held it in her hand. She then used the blood on her hand from where she’d removed the trap to gently drew her rune just above the deer's shredded leg.
Satisfied that her rune was good, Angela held the mistletoe to the centre circle of the rune and focused on drawing in the forest's vitality. This time though, she directed that power not into herself but into the rune, willing it to life so that it could perform its magic and heal the deer’s leg.
Once the connection was made, the rune started to glow slightly. Its magic seemed to separate from Angela, no longer needing her as a conduit to draw on the forest’s vitality. Angela watched as the wound sealed itself shut, leaving behind smooth, scar-free flesh. Soon, both the sprig of mistletoe and the rune itself glowed a soft red and then crumbled into dust, signifying the end of the spell.
This! This is why I wanted to be a Druid!
Angela’s heart filled with joy. The deer looked at her curiously now, but Angela knew in her heart that it was thankful for the aid she had given it. With a loving hand, Angela reached out and placed her palm gently on the deer’s neck.
As soon as her hand made contact, the deer’s eyeballs went wide, and it reared up on its hind legs like a horse in a slap fight with a kangaroo.
Angela had no time to react. Before she could even cry out, the deer leapt, made a complete 180° turn, planted its front legs in the dirt, and delivered a two-hoofed hindleg kick directly to her chest that launched her through the air and sent her smashing into a tree trunk on the other side of the clearing.
Angela lay groaning in the dirt as she watched the deer bound off into the woods. “You motherfucker,” she wheezed.
She tried to grab a pebble to throw at the animal, only to discover that her arm now possessed an unexpected joint in the
middle of her forearm.
“Nyaah!” she shouted, clutching her broken arm and rocking back and forth. “Stupid fucking animals in this stupid fucking forest on the stupid fucking planet!” She looked skyward and shouted, “This planet SUUUUUUCKS!”
Gritting her teeth, Angela forced her way back to her feet. Something was definitely grinding against something inside her arm, but at least it hadn’t broken through the skin. There was also something super shitty going on with her ribs. It helped to know that she could heal herself once her spell was off cooldown, but it’s not like that made it hurt any less.
Furious at the outcome of her attempt at being a good little Druid, Angela picked up her shillelagh and staggered in the direction of the river, swearing every step of the way.
Her grumbling and swearing were still going strong when she rounded a tree and was surprised by a stocky gray creature, the beast spinning to face her. Its mouth opened wide as it delivered a sharp-toothed hiss, waving its long-taloned paws at her threateningly, the hair on its back rising with an air of menace. Without a moment’s hesitation, Angela swung her shillelagh at the thing, smashing the weapon down on the creature’s head and killing it with a single blow.
You have slain a Level 2 Terrified Juvenile Badger.
Congratulations on the cold-hearted murder of an animal that mostly eats worms. I’m sure Ennàd will be super happy about that.
25 XP Earned
NEW WEAPON SKILL LEARNED!
Clubs – Skill Level 1 (Tier-0)
Again, congrats on clubbing to death the animal equivalent of an 11-year-old child.
50 XP Earned
“Oops,” Angela said. A rumble of thunder sounded in the sky, and she waved sheepishly skyward. “Sorry about that! It’s just that it caught me by surprise, and I was already in a bad mood ’cause of the deer thing, and in my defence, it looked pretty dangerous. I mean, it doesn’t now. Now it looks pretty small. Like, really small.”
Arrival: Legends of Arenia Book 1 (A LitRPG Story) Page 15
