by Simon Archer
“That’s not possible,” he said in astonishment as if he was looking at a man come back from the dead. “Have you talked with anyone strange? Anyone who sounded strange? Loved the color blue?”
“Wait, you know who did this to me?” I said, nearly shortcircuiting from the overload of priorities, “Nevermind that, I can tell you more about it after we save whoever’s left, which is fucking dwindling while you do your bartop magic trick!” I latched onto his arm and tugged against it in pure futility. “Let’s. Get. Going. You. Big. Blonde. Ape!”
“You aren’t foolish enough to chase after them now.” His hands returned to his work, though the swirling seedlings stopped twirling in a tornado and now imploded in a shaking mass of pink. “You can’t afford to be broken by false hope. You just might be more special than either of us realize now.”
I held back some tears. Why was I so obsessed about this? Was it because I actually gave a shit about them? Was it because this was my first mission as a hero, and it was a massacre I could only sit and watch for? I didn’t know for sure. It just hurt like a bitch that I couldn’t do anything about it.
The creature had come back up from the last of the magic hammers, still coming at us with its infuriating ability to not die. With chaotic force, it smacked and whacked its tentacles against the bubble, but it refused to yield to its brute tactics. Who knew for how long?
“Your heart is kind, and your will is strong,” Torlith continued, his hands collapsing as the tight ball of seedlings shrunk down into a bright point. “Such a talent cannot focus on the hollow hopes that keep the pain away. A hero’s obligation looks to the greater hopes for guidance and strength. Those dreams lie in a brighter future beyond the present darkness. Those are the greatest of this or any world. What is your name, young man?”
“Jeremiah Thorne.” I pressed a hand over my eyes. I refused to shed a tear now. Not for these people that I’d barely met, and not in front of a demigod. This was all bullshit.
“Jeremiah Thorne, you are my greatest hope this day.”
He opened his hands back up, and the flurry of lights had vanished. In its place was a single seed, intensely glowing with pink and green.
“Which one is this?” I asked him. “What about the explosion of seedlings? Did that already happen? Fuck it. I’ll take anything right now if it helps.”
“There are no longer any others.” He pushed his hands out, and the lone seedling floated along with them, leaving to float towards me as he pulled his hands away. “This is the only one now. The only one of its kind. This final gambit has all the magic you will ever need.”
“Zuak, have you not finished the paladin off?” the voice of the dark god had caught up to us, confirming what I’d feared about the others from Earth. “Had I known this would take you so long, perhaps I would have arranged for some stronger help instead. You look terrible. More terrible than usual, I should say.”
“I cannot apologize enough, my lord.” The slithering mass kissed Grune’s ass with its gagging voice. “The paladin’s defenses are desperate, but they are all the stronger for it. I believe he is stalling for something.”
“He forestalls his own demise.” Grune chuckled in his celestial throat, “I assume that dying the first time hurt quite a bit, and he would hope to keep that from happening again if he can help it. Of course, I wouldn’t know a thing about that sort of ‘death’ thing. I’ve never tried it. AND I NEVER WILL! HAHAHAHA! Oh, I slay me. Godhood really was worth the wait.”
“My lord, I don’t mean to interrupt you,” the monster interrupted his boss anyway, “but Torlith’s schemes may be more dangerous than you thought--or, rather, than I foolishly assumed in my failure. The heathen warrior should be lashing out like a desperate rat if he had any chance of surviving, but he remains in his bastion. He currently harbors one of the new monkeys who escaped your glorious purge as well, and all of his spells appear to serve only to defend them while they work in secret.”
“What?”
“Okay, but which one is it?” I asked again. “We’re officially out of-- No, wait.” I stopped myself as I looked at the seed again. “You were doing something different before you learned that I could see the stat displays. What the hell did you do to this seed? What happened to the other ones? What happened to the explosion that’s supposed to give us a chance to escape?”
“The seeds are all still here.” The paladin confirmed my suspicions. “I wouldn’t have attempted this if I didn’t believe you were capable of handling the power. Anyone else, even the greatest practiced mage of my world, could only hope to survive this kind of power, let alone control it. But you’re different. You’re a magickless foreigner with great potential for magic, a blank slate that can be anything, and you’ve developed a gift that shouldn’t be possible. If Lady Fate were kinder, you would have been a general among your fellow heroes and a king among your fellow mages. Now, thanks to my foolishness and your perseverance, you’ll be the greatest of mages and heroes, and the last. Because of that, you must live at any cost. Remember that.”
The seed touched my chest, passing through my sternum and deep into my body. And at that moment, it felt like the bone had exploded, quickly followed by all of my ribs. After that, it was my organs, starting with the lungs and heart and spreading out like a virus to the others. The pain didn’t take long to spread to my limbs and up my neck, saturating every single fiber, every muscle and tendon, and every vein, until just about every nerve in my body screamed at me at once. I tried to scream but was in too much pain to understand how to anymore. Everything else had stopped mattering, stopped existing, only this mind-numbing pain.
And just like that, the pain vanished. I was sweating through every pore in my body and could barely focus on standing up, but I managed to stay on my feet. Holy shit, that was intense.
“I almost thought I’d made another mistake,” Torlith chuckled to himself as his hands began to glow with white light. “But here you still are, having just accomplished the impossible as if it was a troublesome morning after a night at the tavern. Amazing.”
“Jesus, that was worse than any hangover.” I blinked rapidly and grabbed my head, trying to steady my senses again. “What’s the plan now? How are we getting ourselves out of here? Can you teach me a quick spell to give us an opening?”
“Promise me you’ll keep that as you grow,” the big demigod chuckled again, the white lights of his hands reaching out to touch each other as they grew into a thick strand, “that resolve to save every life and to push others to think of life as well, even in the face of certain death. I barely know you, and yet I am already proud of the powerful mage you will one day become and of the man you are now.”
“Stand aside, you useless mop,” Grune ordered his abomination to fall back. “If I let one of these monkey things go, people will start saying I’ve lost my touch at genocide. Damn it, I’ve killed enough people to be the god of genocide. I’ve a title to defend here.”
The bubble was suddenly surrounded by the purple mist, twitching like a thousand fire ants as they searched for any flaw in the magic sphere to turn into an entrance for all of it. It didn’t take them long, and they’d already started to flood inside of our space.
“Good luck, Jeremiah Thorne,” Torlith wrapped his arms around me, shielding as much of my body with his armor as the pale light strand coated me with its magic. “I have not the time to control where this spell will take you, but you have great luck. I believe that luck will carry you through to safety. Grow strong, learn everything you can about magic. The Golden Feather can teach you how to control your magic powers further if you find them. If you find the mage named Galdrin, he may be able to help you with your floating text powers. He has the same power if he still lives. You will know him when you see him. He loves the color blue.”
I could hear the purple sandy cloud clinking and scratching against the metal of Torlith’s armor, the poor man screaming as it must have begun to tear through to his flesh. I looked
between my hands, focusing whatever I felt I could between them to get some sort of magic going that could do something, anything.
The next thing I could see was white and only white. The buzzing had stopped, along with Torlith’s screaming and Zuak’s shrieks. I couldn’t hear Grune’s voice trying to be clever anymore. Only white.
7
White turned to red turned to black turned to blue turned to green turned to yellow, over and over and over, every color between them, swirling around like when I was transported out of my world. The energies wrapped around themselves, swirling and corrupting themselves until they were destroyed and remade again and again in front of me.
As the colors flurried out, they suddenly collapsed upon themselves, snapping into place in the dark and dingy colors of a dark room. At first, I was screaming in terror, thinking I’d managed to become stuck inside of a fantasy version of purgatory. The initial panic subsided, terror turned frustration, and I then realized that I was in another part of the stupid void that the big tentacle monster was still in, which meant that I had to hoof it to the nearest… not-the-same- endless-fucking-void.
Except, I had the time to get a sense of my surroundings, smelling the air as it musted my nostrils, and reflexively curling up from the stale bite of the cold. There was also the fact that I could no longer see my hands or body as I laid down on the freezing, smooth stone beneath me. Another fact I figured out was the current orientation of my physical body, that being horizontal, as I gathered myself.
Good news! Not in the endless void anymore.
Bad news, I was blind and probably deep underground.
Smooth stone floors were a good sign, as that meant that the structure was made by civilization, and any structure made by people needed an exit for those people. Most of the time. If this structure was something like a mausoleum or a crypt, the accessibility of the exit was negotiable, depending on the views of corpse upkeep. I might have been sealed behind some massive stone block next to a lot of dead bodies right about now. And, being in a fantasy world, the deadness of the dead was now equally negotiable.
It wasn’t that I was alone in the dark that worried me. It was that I was not alone in the dark.
But, I had that magic seed in me, so I had magic, only a matter of training and growing before I wouldn’t have had to worry about anything sneaking up on me ever again. The dark would be afraid of me in time. When that was going to happen was a matter of who- even-knew. I didn’t even know how far this would all take me. Torlith said that everything about this situation was an untested territory, and he was a demigod. Maybe I could have been a demigod at one point.
Hold up. If Torlith was a demigod, but he used to be a mortal, then he would have only had the one school of magic inside of him, right? He was using those divine light spells, with all the different fancy light constructs. Maybe some of that was boosted by some god-juice from that Aurum Phoenix, but that was still only one school. Imagine if someone could have had that level of power but with all of the schools at once.
Oh, yes. Oh, yes, indeed. That was going to be me.
Until then, it was humble beginnings, with no sense of direction, no idea about where I was, no pathways out to survive, no hint of a clue about where to even go when I did get out, no inkling of information related to any locations outside of this dark pit, and no light source to see my hands in front of my face. Sucked that I got about zero tips on how to channel the actual magic and just had unlimited potential that I couldn’t touch.
But that wasn’t so difficult to figure out, right? I was sure that once the first spell came through, the rest was going to be a sinch. It was just going to be a bit of a first bump before I truly started my journey to being a powerful mage. Then I could have come up with some crazy spells. And, because I had every school of magic inside of me, I’d have been inventing and perfecting combinations of magic spells that nobody in this world would have seen coming. I was going to have the edge on nearly every battle I fought in that way. I was a one-man mage army. Once I was out of here, everything was going to change for this world.
And I had my stat display ability to help me out in the meantime. If that was making its own light or if it didn’t need me to see the targets in order to notice them, then I could have used it as a sort of enhanced vision. It’d have worked more like a sight that marked targets since the display screen would have shown up right above whatever I was looking at.
Yeah, I was getting desperate and grasping at straws with that last thought. The stat display’s independence from my own vision was an absolute long shot. What else could I have done, though? I was blind either way and panicking about what was in the dark was only going to get my ass killed by a hungry predator.
In the perfect little world that I’d constructed around my stat block ability, if there was something around me, I’d know where they were, in a general sense. All I needed was to spot the dangerous things, so I could have decided to either fight them or avoid them. And it was only until I found a torch or was making my own light with magic. It wouldn’t have been forever.
And besides, in a tomb like this, what were the chances that I was--?
Primal Rat, beast Lv 1
Health: 2/2 Magic: 0
Armor: 0 Shield: 0
Abilities: Plague Carrier
Hm. I deserved that. Kinda wished I had figured out at least one spell before my first fight.
No big deal. No. Big. Deal. The display screen was right there, a shining green square of knowledge, plain as day and in just as much resolution as back in the void. The downside was that it didn’t have the juice to illuminate anything, if it was illuminating at all. In the dark, I couldn’t have really judged the distance it was away from me. If this screen was the same size as the other ones, which I had no guarantee of, then it was somewhere between ten and fifteen yards away.
As luck would have it, the screen did move from side to side in a jittery pattern I would have ascribed to a rat-like creature. That suggested that it was following quite accurately, and I could at least have kept track of where the beast moved. If I was honest, it was probably for the best that I couldn’t have seen the actual horrifying look that a primal, monstrous variant of a rat could have looked like. I could have just pretended that I was fighting an actual rat and not the giant creature I was sure was in front of me now.
I totally wasn’t letting my imagination run away with me while visions of a nightmare rodent that skulked straight from the cracks of hell, with demonic horns, fiery-red eyes, and bleeding gums ready to rend my soul limb from limb like I was some piece of meat, dooming me to an eternity in the plane of punishment designed to make fantasy heroes much stronger than me quake in their boots--
HEY! Hey! Hey. Calm the fuck down. With those stats, it had to be a chump. I mean, come on, really? Level one? That was the lowest possible level, which was obviously super weak.
(I told myself, having no frame of reference for anything in this world.)
Still, it was weak as fuck. Might as well have been a regular rat at this point. Why even bother giving it a stat display? I practically had this in the bag. If I was also level one, then we were practically on equal footing, but I could have spontaneously developed the ability to cast spells at any point. He was basically dead already.
I shouldn’t have gotten ahead of myself. I wasn’t actually level one yet. I was level zero, just like all of the other people from Earth. All the Earth people who were now dead. And now I was the only one with absolutely no magic. No magic, no levels, no equipment, no weapons, no combat training to speak of. That wasn’t entirely true. There was that one year of Muay Thai training I didn’t remember paying for but showed up to every class, anyway. That was money down the toilet if I didn’t take advantage of the lessons. Hurt like a bitch, was nearly five years ago, and I didn’t remember a single thing from those lessons at the moment.
But this was a rat I was fighting here. A rat! Even if it was a giant rat, a rat was the go-t
o beginner monster for fantasy systems. They were great for letting the players get used to all the different quirks and moving parts so they could better get a handle on how to play. A rat was essentially the fantasy equivalent of a target dummy for spells and weapons. It posed no threat to my person.
Or, at least, I thought that at first. Then I took a look at that Plague Carrier ability’s description, which popped up as soon as I focused on it:
This creature is infested with diseases and sickness, which serves to protect it against larger predators who try to bite into it. While no single illness is likely to kill, the several that can accrue over an encounter with it will cripple even the mightiest hunters.
50% chance to contract a disease from any contact
Ho, boy.
Chump or no, I literally couldn’t touch the thing unless I wanted some crazy fantasy disease. Fantasy diseases always had unfortunately cool names, like ‘stonejoint’ or ‘bonespike curse’ or ‘bloodmaggot disease’ that just evoked the most horrifying mental images of what happened to someone who contracted them. No close combat. No bueno.
I had no ranged weapons and no working spells yet, ranged or otherwise. Even if I did have any of those options, I couldn’t see the actual rat to hit it with those things that I still didn’t have! I was literally fighting it blindly and with my bare hands, which played right into its ability like a dumbass fly into a web. Even shooting blindly would have been better than punching it in the dark and hoping it couldn’t see me well enough to bite me. Hell, I would have thrown fresh turds at it or the less disgusting tiny pebble I should have thought of first as an improvised ranged variant before I risked those super diseases that crippled mighty hunters. I was no mighty hunter yet. I was a humble and confused alien about as lost as it got.