by Simon Archer
I went to go poke my hand through her incorporeal face and was stopped by her very corporeal nose.
12
“Ah!” Delilah sucked in a startled breath, waking from my poke to her face with her wide, onyx eyes with ruby irises.
“Augh!” I shouted, crawling backward on my feet and hands as if I’d just now seen a ghost. I had no idea to what level that was accurate, now that she’d lost the main trademark of being a ghost.
“What the hell happened?” the previously spectral girl spoke, this time with a decidedly normal and unmagicked voice and in a much more informal tone than before. “What’s going on? Why do my eyes hurt?”
“I, uh…” Words failed me. “I don’t know. I was improvising a bit at the end. And the middle and beginning. The whole thing. I had no idea what I was doing. Do you have a way to turn off your ghost-phasing thing, by chance?”
“OwowowowowoAHAHAHAHAHA!” Delilah’s pained yelps turned to manic laughter, scaring me more than anything she’d done as an undead. “Gods be damned, these are feelings! I’m breathing! I’m touching! I can feel things again! I’m feeling things!” She tapped her palms on the ground, laughing like a crazy person yet again. “How’s this even possible? Did I finally go crazy? Are you a figment of a mad dream, Jeremiah Thorne?”
“Okay, so it’s not just me feeling crazy,” I said, trying to alleviate some of the tension I was feeling from the suddenly intense and unhinged vibe I was getting from Delilah. “You doing alright? Do you need some water? You’ll have to give me a minute to figure out how to recharge, and then a few more to figure out how to do water magic. I’m sure that couldn’t have been too hard.”
She ignored me, choosing to slap the ground some more. After she was done with that, she got to her feet, stomping around on them as she ran her fingers through her hair, clumping the hair into her hands and tugging the bundles lightly. Next, like a frog that’d just snorted some crack, she leaped across the room in one bound, bouncing off the wall as she hopped to the one opposite. All the will, she was giggling madly, playing the most intense game of ‘the floor is lava’ that had ever been played.
Was that normal? That couldn’t have been normal. It wasn’t like she possessed a body that happened to look like her was it? How long did this last? Did I do anything terrible to her in the meantime? Was this even safe for her? Was it safe for me? Giving an unfeeling creature the ability to feel all of a sudden might have led to the emotional maturity of a newborn. That and magic couldn’t have been a good combination.
Understandably curious about the developing situation, I went to see the display on Delilah, wondering if there was anything happening with her abilities or status, or whatever it could have been, that might have told me what in God’s name I did to this poor girl to give her a body. How did that even happen? How did that happen by accident?
Before I could have checked, a blue update screen appeared before me:
You have discovered a new, advanced spell!
Learned: Expert Tier spell: Revenant Transformation
Spell Requirements - Primary: Death Lv 8; Secondary: Nature Lv 1,
Control Lv 5, Hex Lv 5
Effect: Changes an undead’s monster sub-type to: Revenant
Oh, wow. I didn’t realize I was going so hard at the spell to discover something like this. Was I leveling up the spell augments as I was using them? The screens didn’t show me those updates individually. Maybe that was for the best. I mean, it was already getting ridiculous at this point, and adding more updates now was going to bog everything down.
As far as ‘advanced’ went, did this mean that I’d discovered a really high-level spell or just a spell above my level? I was kind of hoping for the first option, but only because that would have meant that I could hit way above my weight class. I’d have already been kicking it with the likes of Merlin and Gandalf. I couldn’t have hoped that high right now, though.
Not yet. Soon.
On that note, now that I learned about this, I realized that there had to be established spells that had specific effects, letting all mages of a certain school learn them, so that way they weren’t guessing on spells like I’d been doing this whole time. Staple spells, like a fireball or a lightning bolt. Classic spells that every mage should have known. Something that I could have used as a go-to in case of an improvisational nightmare or an emergency. I hadn’t gotten a spellbook, so they weren’t going to show up there. Did I have some kind of list of spells I knew somewhere? Probably on that ‘status screen’ I hadn’t gotten the chance to check out yet.
As I tapped out of that screen, I got a new blue update right after it:
You have increased your level to: Lv 5
+12 increase to all attributes, skills, spells, and defenses
Abilities Gained: Blood Fury, Feral Forms, Wizard’s Familiar
Did I jump up three levels with that discovery? I didn’t know I could have leveled like that. Maybe I’d just killed her, or reverse-killed her as an undead, so that was what was being recorded here. Eh, that seemed like a stretch, even for a magic world.
Damn, I could have skyrocketed in levels at this rate since I didn’t have a limit on how many augments or levels I could have put on a spell. I bet most ‘expert’ mages couldn’t have reached that level normally at twenty-five levels, but I did it at level two. There were probably dozens of master level spells I could have been flinging around before long, just because I didn’t have to worry about caps on my spells like they did. I was probably going to have ridiculous stats by the end of this.
How did Torlith manage to earn that ‘Ascended’ status? I mean, besides the ‘dying’ part. I didn’t want to die quite just yet. Or maybe ever, if magic could have safely done something about that. But I couldn’t have denied the possibilities evoked by the buffs it gave him. That alone increased all of his scores and his damage by ten times the maximum at all times. Any time his stats increased, they were increased by ten times the normal level. With how fast I was growing, that kind of boost at all times would have just bumped me into godhood before I could have blinked.
Possibly. I still didn’t know how high up gods and demigods were compared to me. I never saw their levels. They’d been specifically blocked by something that my analyst screen wasn’t even capable of touching back then. For all I knew, they could have been in the thousands already, with score increases well beyond what was in my sights at my current level.
And more abilities. Fuck, I was going to have a damn miniature essay to read if I didn’t get cracking on some of these readings. These new ones sounded fun, too. My nerd senses were tingling, telling me that these were going to be particularly fun. Words like ‘feral’ and ‘fury’ were delicately fantastic in a fantasy setting. Usually meant that whoever had it was better at getting their hands dirty in a very nasty way.
At any rate, it was time to see my new scores, so I pressed through my next set of updates to see the results of my boost:
Jeremiah Thorne, Human Novice Mage Lv 5
Health: 415 Magic: 545
Armor: 25 Aegis: 75
Abilities: Seed of Voloth, Omni Potential, Growth Beyond, Final Act, Otherworldly, Harrowing Experience, Status Screen, Determination, Blood Fury, Feral Forms, Wizard’s Familiar
Magic School: Omnimage
Spell Strength: +99 Magic Salvage: +119
Strike: +84 Resolve: +89
Specialization: None
Spell Level Maximum: Unlimited
Spell Augment Maximum: Unlimited
Mage Attributes
Strength: 84 Intellect: 99
Endurance: 89 Cunning: 83
Charm: 77 Sense: 90
Spell Augmentations
Elements: Death Lv 20, Earth Lv 15, Flames Lv 22, Impact Lv 15, Nature Lv 20, Lightning Lv 18, Mind Lv 15, Poison Lv 15, Radiance Lv 23, Space Lv 15,
Time Lv 15, Twilight Lv 15, Water Lv 15, Wind Lv 15
Types: Aura Lv 18, Beam Lv 15, Blast Lv 15, Bomb Lv 16, Control Lv 22,<
br />
Creation Lv 16, Enchantment Lv 22, Hex Lv 18, Self Lv 19
Job Skills
Mundane: Acrobat Lv 18, Artisan Lv 15, Beastmaster Lv 15, Covert Lv 15, Defender Lv 19,
Doctor Lv 15, Hunter Lv 16, Gladiator Lv 20, Generalist Lv 15, Presence Lv 17, Pugilist Lv 15, Researcher Lv 15, Trickster Lv 15, Sniper Lv 15
Magic: Alchemist Lv 15, Demonologist Lv 15, Elementalist Lv 15, Mythozoologist Lv 15,
Occultist Lv 15, Priest Lv 15, Spiritualist Lv 25, Spellweaver Lv 30
Special: Analyst Lv 30
Mercy. These were all going to get ridiculous really fast. By the time my mage level reached ten, everything else was going to be a minimum of fifty-five. A lot of these were skills I wasn’t even touching yet, and I was getting stronger in all of them. If all the other mages only had a small combination of these skills, I was starting to see how being the Omnimage with a full palette of all the skills and abilities was going to break this system like a vigilante’s back. They thought magic was their ally. They only adopted the magic. I was born in it. Molded by it. I didn’t know about regular spellcasting until I was already a mage. But then it was only restraining.
Heh. I was obviously facetious just now. I’d only had magic for half an hour. I was a baby mage by any standard, no matter how far I’d come just now.
“What are you looking at?” Delilah’s voice spoke up from behind the last update screen.
I jumped as I turned off the screen, then jumped again as I saw Delilah’s face right next to mine, her otherworldly eyes staring into mine. Now that she wasn’t all ghostly and had some flesh on her bones, she was very… enchanting. Not in a weird, mystical sort of way that made her almost unnerving, either. Just in a way that I couldn’t quite put to words. It was magical, but it didn’t feel forced. She still had the pale skin, the black lips and hair, and the unique set of eyes, but it was all warmer now. And she was smiling. She was also very, very close to me. Stiflingly, yet amazingly close.
Was I staring down the tear on her tunic and chainmail to see her cleavage? What? Me? A proper, respectable citizen of the new world? A hero mage, the last of the new heroes left who had a chance to save the realm with virtue, honor, dignity, and pride? How dare anyone have the balls, the audacity, even, to think to dare to think to accuse my moral character, to reprimand my actions, to question and impugn my honor, by even suggesting the very idea, the completely unfathomable notion of such a vulgar--
Yeah. Yeah, I was. In my defense, the deck was stacked against me. Very stacked. Anyone would have broken in my place. I’d have put money on her breaking the wills of people who didn’t even swing her way.
“Nothing,” I said without thinking about what I was blatantly staring at, but caught myself, “not nothing! Something very, um, very impressive, I would say. Very impressive. Just top-notch, bravo. Well done, I’d say. Good job with the… healthy… milk-drinking?”
Was there a spell for removing my foot from my own mouth? Or my head from my ass? Goddamnit. Always with the beautiful girls, too. The words came out of my mouth completely fine when I talked with anyone else, but as soon as they were attractive, my coherence brain cells went on vacation, in amounts proportionately linked to how hot they were.
As anyone might have guessed, they were all out on holiday right now.
“Why thank you,” she giggled, inching up closer to me. She’d gotten on her hands and knees as she slowly, but not subtly, moved to overtop of me, little by little “Nice to hear that it’s easy to see the results of my training. I was afraid that, after being dead for so long, that I’d lost some weight. But I’m still in top-notch shape. That was what you were talking about, right?”
“You also sound much more casual,” I commented, trying to move the topic to something I could have handled while I regathered my wits, “It sounds good, don’t get me wrong. You sound happier, and I like it. I just didn’t realize that talking dramatically and formally was just part of being a ‘tormented ghost,’ and not your real speaking tone. You learn something new every day.”
“I know, right?” She laughed again, moving herself to sit on my legs and pinch my hips between her thighs, then overtly slapped her hands on my cheeks, “Oh, my gods, it was the worst! Do you have any idea what it’s like to be forced to talk like you’re the damn queen of Gamant?” Delilah brought her hands off my face, twiddling her fingers as she wrinkled her nose. “‘Oogity Boogity Boo! I am the scary ghost woman who lives in these haunted halls! I am curs-ed to live out a stupid necromancer’s sadistic abuse fetish by sounding like his neglectful mother for all of eternity! Blergelerghah!”
“I take it you’re not a fan of necromancers?” I said after I laughed. “Is that what happened to you? Were you killed by one and cursed to guard this tomb?”
“It was a team of them!” She began counting on her fingers. “Five in total. I beat the first two to a pulp, but the third one faked me out with a zombie clone switch at the last minute, throwing me off my momentum. The last two got their corpse goons to trap me down while I was off balance. Instead of just killing me like any decent person would have done, they cursed me to guard this tomb forever while they ran off with my prize.”
“Were you alone?” I asked. “Did you not have your own team to back you up?”
“I should’ve had a team,” she moped, “but those hay-chewers wouldn’t come on this quest. They said it was ‘too dangerous to risk for a stupid necklace, Delilah.’” Her hand puppeted her former comrade as she spoke in a nasal tone to mock them. “‘You’re so dumb, Delilah. A necklace that makes your skin like armor can’t be real, Delilah.’ Spineless bunch of cowards. Who needs them? I bet they’re dead by now, anyway. What year is it? Do you know? I’m a bit out of the loop down here.”
“I hoped you might know better than me about that.” I tried my best to distract from the… arising situation underneath Delilah. “Like I said before, I’m new to all of this. Like, ‘all of it’ all of it. Every of the all of it. Even if you knew the year and told me straight to my face, I’d have no idea what it meant. That’s the level of new.”
“Yeah, you were saying that you came here from a portal.” She grabbed my hands by the wrists as she kept talking. “Where from?”
“From a strange white void… zone?” I said as my hands were placed on the revenant girl’s thighs. “It wasn’t really anywhere, more of a staging area between this world and mine.”
“You’re from another world?” She grabbed my face again. “I’d have called you mad, but you just created a body for me out of nothing. Now I’m not surprised that such a powerful mage came from some magical land far away.”
“Um, that’s also really new,” I said, nervously laughing, “So, funny story, I didn’t actually have any magic to speak of until I got to that white void place, and even then, I didn’t have access to any spells until shortly after I came here. Not a powerful mage quite just yet. That spell you just witnessed basically drained me dry, and I was mixing it up as I was throwing it out. I even lost a fair chunk of my health finishing it off at the end. Had it gone on just a few seconds longer or so, and we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“You know blood magic?” Delilah moved her hands down to my neck. “You really do have a bit of everything, don’t you?”
“Yeah, it’s a gift and a curse.” I tapped my fingers against the metal plates of her leggings, wondering if it would have been creepy of me to start unbuckling these buckles. Was that what she wanted? “I don’t even know most of what I’m capable of right now. Mostly just guessing and getting lucky. Spontaneously creating life out of nothing. It comes with being a previously magicless human with no formal training, I guess.”
“A human?” She went to rub my ear tips, “what’s that? Is that what these round ears are from? You didn’t look like a dwarf, so I thought this was some kind of bizarre scarring from a hateful orc or something.”
“Those are all-natural, my dear,” I tried to sound suave,
probably failing, “I’m a true blue alien on this planet.”
“That’s starting to make some sense, actually,” she stroked her hands back down to my neck. “I’ve never met an elf nearly half as interesting as you before, or really anyone quite so unlike anyone else.”
“Honey, please.” I attempted to be suave. “There isn’t anyone like me in your whole world. And I mean that literally. I am very unique.”
“And now, thanks to you,” she stood herself up, taking a few steps back to strike a pose, then turn around and strike another one, “I bet there’s no many like me in the world, either. Any other ghost would have had to possess a corpse to even try something like this, but even that wouldn’t have any blood or sensations. How many other undead do you know with an honest-to-the-gods real, living body? No rotting flesh, no useless limbs, or stiff fingers. I still can feel the deathly energies within me surging, but I still don’t have to worry about my skin falling off, you know?”
“It all looks great from here.” I evaluated. Perhaps a few moments more thoroughly than was polite for a stranger. “I’m sorry that it’s not quite what you had before, though. I would have shot for that if I had known how to.”
“You’ve given me a new chance at actually living again.” She went over to one of the ceremonial shields hanging on a floor mount, using the metallic reflection to look at her face. “I couldn’t love it more, even if it’s in this state. This might even be better in some ways. Not many elvish women could get a complexion this fine or make up this even without any trouble. I know a few girls that will be very jealous if they’re alive to see this. That thought alone makes everything that’s happened worth the trouble.”