“Mac! I’m in a bit of a rough spot here!”
There was a moment of static before the AI answered.
[What’s the issue? I’m in between scans right now, give me a minute and I can fire another one off.]
“I don’t have a minute Mac! I’m under attack. Two elves snuck up on me, different from the ones in the caverns below, but they must have spread word somehow. I’m beginning to suspect that these elves aren’t very friendly to strangers. Do you have anything I can use?”
[Hold on. I’m scanning through The Wanderer’s files. There’s got to be something in here about combat… Ah-ha! Here’s something! It says as the owner of this vessel you should have access to the local magic!]
“Avada Kedavra!” I shouted out loud. Nothing happened. “Nothing is happening Mac!” I replied anxiously.
[Not that kind of magic! I’m looking for instructions… okay, it looks like it has something to do with zeal floating around in the air. You use your will to gain control of it, then you weave it into spells.]
“Focus… and make spells. I can do this,” I whispered to myself, trying my best to make magic happen. If only this were a video game, then I’d be able to just press a button and make it happen. An idea came to me, and in that instant I was greeted by another message. My excitement built, until I read the messages contents.
Error. You do not have the prerequisite skills or spellheart to use the Fireball spell.
Damn it! I guess I’d just have to do this the physical way.
I blocked another two darts, which forced me to block my own vision with my shield. That’s when a tricky dart came in from below, hitting me in the leg. Luckily there was enough cloth left in my ragged pants to turn the dart into a scratch instead of letting it sink deep into my flesh.
The other elf wasn’t idle while this was happening. Having used her net, she pulled out something that looked like a willow branch with thorns. She had a vicious gleam in her eye as she cracked it in the air, and I only just managed to block it with my shield.
I backed up to the tree where I’d set my glass-tipped spear. I should have brought it with me to the riverbank, but it was still nearby.
I turned and ran, which exposed my back to both the whip and a dart. The whip cracked against the plastic armor Mac had made, which kept it from doing any real damage. The dart on the other hand managed to weave its way through the mesh of plastic and bark to sink into my left shoulder. Instantly, I felt a numbing sensation spread to cover that entire area. The elf must have been using poisoned tips.
I ignored the feeling as best I could, though I lost some control over my shield. My arm felt sluggish and clumsy now, and I wasn’t sure if I could depend on it to block a blow. I picked up my spear and started getting more aggressive with my counterattack. I could feel the poison making my body sluggish and I knew time was against me.
I dove forward with my spear, lunging downward. The whip-wielder realized that she wouldn’t be able to block my spear with her whip and dropped the weapon in favor of the gray wooden sword she’d been wielding before. She tried to parry my sword, but was far too slow.
My spear landed directly in the middle of her bare stomach, piercing her flesh and sending droplets of blood spilling to the ground. The elf fell to her knees, clutching at her belly with an expression of shock on her face.
“Eltiana!” came a cry from the distance. There was another elf who had been there, not too far away. I hadn’t seen him thus far because he stayed back, but this one looked a great deal more masculine than the other elves, though by human standards he’d still be considered effeminate. The look on his face was not like the others. There was no lusty expression there. Only contempt, followed by rage. He reached to his hip, where a large wooden crossbow was strapped, already strung with a wicked looking purple-tipped bolt.
He brought the crossbow to his shoulder and stared me down through the sights. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the dart-thrower ready to throw her last three darts, but I ignored her. I was already poisoned, so dealing with more of those darts was lower priority than dealing with the crossbow wielder. Based on the thickness of those limbs and the size of those bolts, that weapon was built for punching holes the girth of my arm. Those bolts would be the end of me if I got shot.
I brought my shield up just in time to block the wicked looking shaft as it spiraled through the air. My shield held strong, for a moment. While Mac’s plastic couldn’t hold an edge, it was tough stuff. Tougher than an equivalent sheet of hardwood. Even so, the crossbow bolt impacted just to the left of the thick dome in the center of the shield and embedded itself into my left forearm. I was just barely able to see the tip of the crossbow bolt sticking out the other side.
Damn it. My arm had only just healed from the rat bite.
I had to act quickly before he could get another shot off. I ran up to the dart throwing elf and tried to slash at her with my broken sword, but she was too quick. She ducked under my blade and slid between my legs only to emerge behind me, where she planted four more of her remaining darts in my shoulder.
Clearly, she’d expected that to take me down, but I was able to shrug off the effects of whatever it was she’d injected into me. Thanks to that, I was able to swat her in the side of the head with the back of my spear. She collapsed to the ground, seemingly unconscious, though likely she just had a bad enough concussion that she’d be too dizzy to stand back up.
The elf with the crossbow nearly had his bolt loaded and ready. I wasn’t going to reach him before he’d have the chance to fire. Not unless I slowed him down.
I hopped on one leg, heaving with my body and shoulder. I threw my spear like a javelin, and it soared through the air. Its course stayed true, until it embedded itself in the shoulder of the male elf.
Unlike my metal sword, the bronze tip on the spear did not cause the elf searing agony. As the spear impacted his shoulder, he grunted in pain. I would have expected him to collapse immediately from the weight of my weapon sticking out of him, but he stood firm. Even wounded as he was, he had just finished cocking his crossbow and loosed his bolt at me. I’d been closing the distance, and I was already far too close to dodge. In a panic, I thrust my broken sword at his arm to throw the bolt off course, but the elf still managed to pull the trigger a moment before I took his hand off with my broken sword. The iron passed through the elf’s wrist far easier than I’d expected, but the crossbow bolt still hit my thigh, passing most of the way out the other side.
This time the pain was even more excruciating than the one in my forearm. Maybe it was just because I’d grown accustomed to having that particular limb pierced to the bone, or maybe the one in my leg hit a particularly important spot. In any case, I needed medical attention soon.
Still, I managed to bring my broken sword up a final time and cut the male elf’s throat. He collapsed to the ground with a whimper, and as he did, his body started to age visibly before my eyes.
In seconds, he became nothing but dust, which blew away in the wind. In the place where he’d been standing was a finger-sized wisp of light, glowing the same deep shade of purple as the dead elf’s hair.
Enemy defeated. 145 points awarded.
The wisp orbited the site of the elf’s death for a few minutes before drifting off over the creek.
I grabbed the crossbow and tossed some of the elf’s clothes over my shoulder. I’d need every scrap of cloth to bandage my new wounds soon. If I didn’t collapse from the pain or bleed out in the next few minutes.
With reserves of strength I didn’t know I had, I plucked the darts from my leg and all the ones I could reach from my back.
The numbing feeling stopped spreading, but by that point I wondered if I was better with that anesthetic than without it. If I was feeling this much pain despite the effects of whatever drug had been in the darts, I’d have long since collapsed into unconsciousness without them.
Slowly, I trod over to the dart-throwing elf. She’d since clambered to
her feet and was desperately doing chest-compressions on the dying elf I’d stabbed in the stomach. Her hands and clothes were covered in blood and she had tears in her eyes.
I held out my iron sword and moved towards her. She scrambled back but was obviously still disoriented from my blow to her head as she quickly collapsed to the ground.
I lifted my good leg and pressed my foot against her stomach, pinning her to the ground. She was a quick one, but not nearly as strong as the blue-haired elf I’d fought before. Now that I had her at my mercy, she was practically helpless.
Logic said I should slit her throat. If she lived, whoever sent these elves would know where I was. And it wasn’t like issues between me and whatever group she belonged to could just be peacefully resolved now. Even if the other female elf lived, which was unlikely, the male elf had clearly been killed by my hand. That wasn’t something that their group was likely to let go of easily. Sparing an enemy today would mean I wouldn’t be safe in this area any longer, since they were certain to come back.
But killing the helpless elf didn’t seem like the right thing to do. She had tears in her eyes and was in the middle of trying to save her friend’s life. Even now, she was glancing at her companion’s still body, worrying about her situation more than her own.
The whole thing tugged at my heartstrings just a bit too much. Maybe it was her pretty face, maybe it was the tears in her eyes. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.
I pressed the broken blade against her throat, in an obvious threat. Even with the thing just barely touching her skin, I could see blisters starting to form at her throat. I coughed, my throat unused to speaking in recent days, since all my communications with Mac happened via my implant. Because of that, my voice came out far more guttural than it normally did.
“Listen here,” I said dangerously as the blade pressed against her throat. She whimpered and closed her eyes, apparently waiting for death. “I could have killed you right here, right now, but I’m not. That should count for something.”
I pulled the sword away, and the elf looked up at me, surprise evident in her face. She wouldn’t have understood a word I said, but body language was universal. I had her dead to rights, and yet I was sparing her life.
Enemy defeated. 165 points awarded.
That was interesting. I was awarded points even when I didn’t kill my opponent. It appeared that surrender was all that was necessary.
I threw the upper portions of the dead male elf’s garments at her feet. She recognized the gesture for what it was and picked it up after I’d removed my foot from her chest.
She bowed deeply, hands clasped one in the other and made a fist over her heart. Then she pressed the cloth to her friends’ wounds in an attempt to stop the bleeding.
I didn’t think she’d succeed. Gut wounds in the middle ages were usually a slow death sentence. The danger of infection was too high. Then again, considering I hadn’t gotten an infection from a set of giant rat teeth plunging into my skin, maybe that wasn’t a problem in this world.
Regardless of what happened, I wasn’t sticking around. Already I was starting to stagger. Though I spared the purple-haired elf’s life, there was no telling if she’d do the same for me if I collapsed somewhere nearby.
I made another tourniquet for both my leg and my arm and collected my spear to use as a walking stick. Given that my left arm was also wounded, I had to use it awkwardly in my right, so the going was slow. Even with my wounds bandaged I was still leaving a trail of blood behind me dripping in the sand.
Any moron with a pair of eyes would be able to track me. I needed to lose the trail. I could walk upstream in the creek for a little while. That would wash away any blood trail and give me the chance to lose any trackers I might pick up. The cave system that Mac was in wasn’t too far away. I could hole up in there. Nobody had found that place in four hundred years. Maybe I could heal up in there and wait? Mac might be able to make something to help me, or maybe the ship would let me buy medical supplies with points. I checked my points. 402. That was just barely enough to buy the medical bay.
The numbness from the darts was starting to fade, and the pain in my body continued to increase. A pit of despair welled up inside me as full feeling returned to my wounded limbs. I wasn’t going to make it. I was going to die here in this creek.
I stumbled along, bit by bit. As the feeling came back to my leg it started to get harder to walk. Eventually I tripped on a rock and fell down in the water. It took a supreme effort of will just to flop over on my back so I could breathe.
This felt rather nice. The water flowed around me, surrounding my body and encasing me in its cool embrace as it carried me along, without a care in the world. The water visibly seeped into my wounds, searing them with a flickering flame that felt almost alive. It should have hurt, but it was actually somewhat pleasurable. Maybe the pain centers of my brain had just been maxed out and was spilling over into the pleasure-governing regions. Maybe this was just what death felt like. At any rate, as consciousness faded I had a smile on my face.
The last thing I remembered was my body being picked up by the stream and carried away.
CHAPTER SIX
THE FIRST THING I realized when I awoke was that I was naked. I braced myself for crippling waves of pain but was pleasantly surprised when I only found a dull throb. Underneath me, I felt neither the grimy forest floor nor the soothing water of the river. It felt like evenly spaced strands of rope, between which a warm breeze blew and gently rocked me. I was lying in a hammock, but how did I get there?
I opened my eyes and realized that there was a presence looming over me. She had green-hair and matching green eyes, which were scanning me up and down while her fingers moved a brush across an open scroll. Dimly, she reminded me of my elvish companion back at the brothel. After a moment’s study I realized that her features were different. She was similar in appearance, but was a different elf entirely. Maybe a relative.
I was just barely able to see that on the scroll was a crude representation of my naked form, erect cock and all.
What’s more, it looked like it was a heavily annotated diagram. There were endless tiny lines of script on the page, organized in neat rows. It reminded me vaguely of the script I’d seen back in the cave, but altered for writing with a brush instead of a chisel. Instead of rough, straight lines, there were lots of arcs of varying width with smooth, circular patterns throughout the text. It was elegant and beautiful in the same way the stone carvings had been austere and imposing.
That made the writing clash horribly with the lewd drawing of my naked body right next to it. The drawing reminded me of a medical diagram from Gray’s Anatomy and was somewhat embarrassing with its accuracy and attention to detail. My stomach was flabby from years without exercising any muscle other than my brain. I certainly didn’t have Dean’s level of muscle tone.
I tried to sit up but found I couldn’t. My wounded left arm was bound in a wooden splint and my right arm to a loop of wood that supported the hammock I was in. There was a similar splint on my left leg, except this one had some sort of strange tube-like contraption sticking out of it filled with a pale blue fluid. After looking at the tube, I realized it was plumbed into me through my leg, right where the crossbow bolt had hit me. Now that I had noticed it, I realized there was a soothing sensation spreading from that spot on my leg, and I felt no pain from there. The bolt must have been removed and I must have either healed or be on painkillers. I tried to twitch the leg but nothing happened. Painkillers then. While the other leg hadn’t been hit with a crossbow bolt, it had taken its share of pain from the fighting and I could only weakly move it. I definitely wouldn’t be walking any time soon.
My good right leg was bound to the other end of the hammock, just like my right arm. With two of my limbs wounded and the other two immobile, I was quite helpless.
My captor was in the middle of creating a detailed diagram of my more intimate parts, and the warm feeling I’d felt o
n my groin was her making adjustments to get a better view. Something about the elf felt incredibly familiar. Which was odd, since I hadn’t met many elves. Maybe I was just bad at reading elven faces, and all elves looked the same to me.
The green-haired elf was engrossed in her work. So much so that she hadn’t noticed me waking up. I made a noise to get her attention, causing her to drop her writing brush in surprise.
“Hello there,” I said in as gentle a voice as possible. I felt blood rush to my face. I wasn’t a virgin, especially if you count the elves I’d met in the brothel, but it was still quite embarrassing to be strapped naked to a hammock in front of somebody pretty.
The elf chattered something in that strange language they shared. I recognized the tones and patterns as similar to what I’d heard back in the brothel, with slightly different stresses on certain syllables. A local dialect, perhaps?
Processing language data… 27% complete
Another message appeared, indicating that whatever had become of my implant after the pocket watch had merged with it would eventually be capable of providing me some form of translation. That was good.
I tried to repeat some of her words, hoping that might get her to keep talking. I was eager to see what would happen once I got that progress bar got to a hundred percent.
The green-haired elf continued to frown and then repeated my words back to me.
“There,” She said carefully, her tongue flicking across the words as she tried to enunciate them just as I did.
“I’m Theo,” I replied, trying to keep my words short.
“Immatheo,” The elf repeated.
Zeal of the Mind and Flesh: A Cultivating Gamelit Harem Adventure (Spellheart Book 1) Page 9