Blessed Time: A LitRPG Adventure

by Cale Plamann

  More pressingly, at the other end of the arena, stood a gigantic red lizard.  Frankly, it looked like one of the dragons from Keeper Ansom’s records and legends except for its lack of wings.  It was just taller than Micah at its shoulder, but its torso was the size of a house without even including its head or tail.  Those almost doubled its already colossal length.

  Its tail, a long, sinuous affair covered in densely packed burgundy scales, ended in a forearm-length blade of sharpened ivory.  The beast flicked it from side to side with a speed and agility that brought sweat to the back of Micah’s neck.  If the monster got close enough to use it, that blade would be almost impossible to avoid.

  The creature’s head, an ugly mix of jaws and bone spikes, sat at the end of a long, curving neck as it stared down at Micah with the reptilian eyes of a predator.  The entire arena shook slightly when one of its gigantic, clawed feet came down, digging into the sand that formed the floor.  It snorted again before inhaling and arching its neck backward.

  Micah threw himself to the side, cursing the uncertain sand footing of the arena floor as it slowed him.  The beast exhaled a beam of light that slammed into the ground where Micah had been standing with the force of a trebuchet.  The sand exploded into the air, spraying him with molten droplets that rapidly whittled away Micah’s hit points.

  He rolled to his feet, patting out the areas where his cloak still burned from the hissing liquid beads of sand.  Behind him, the ground clicked as it cooled and hardened into a misshapen crater of black glass.

  “Well,” he mumbled to himself as he used Mending to restore the hit points lost in the attack, “I guess that rules out peppering it with attacks from afar and using a Wind Shield to protect myself.”

  The monster dug its claws into the sand, digging deep furrows before it launched itself into a great, rumbling leap toward Micah that cleared almost a third of the distance between the two of them.  It quickly settled into a sprint that covered an uncomfortable amount of ground with each stride.

  Micah frantically tried to cast Plant Weave as it charged, hoping against all odds that he’d be able to find dormant plant life beneath the sand of the arena floor.

  The spell reached out, searching for any signs of life to latch on to.  The monster managed to take another two steps before the Plant Weave snagged a handful of roots dwelling conveniently close to the surface.

  Immediately, Micah forced mana from the spell into them, magically inducing the dormant vegetation to grow.  He completed the casting by implanting the spell image—his mental conception of what the completed spell would look like—into the roots.  In his mind, they twisted together into a densely woven snare that stealthily slipped out from the sand and grabbed one of the monster’s ankles.

  It’d do.  It had to.

  Micah held his breath, watching as the noose of roots crest from the sand just as the creature approached.  With a burst of energy from him, it lunged upward, catching the right-front foot of the lizard.

  For a second, everything worked perfectly. The lizard’s leg yanked against the vegetation and pulled it off balance. It planted its other leg and strained to pull itself toward Micah.

  Then the plants ripped, the overwhelming momentum of the multi-ton monster more than a match for a handful of hastily grown roots and vines.

  Micah’s eyes widened as he began stuttering out the chant to Updraft, hoping that he could get the third-tier spell off quickly enough that he would be able to jump past the charging monster.  It wouldn’t be in time.  The scaled monstrosity was moving too fast, and he’d tried the stunt with snagging its foot too close.  He could already practically feel the creature’s hot breath on his face.

  Its clawed foot missed the ground.  The Plant Weave had thrown off its gait by a fraction of a step, and the lizard was moving too fast to recover.

  Micah could see the surprise in its eyes as it tumbled forward, planting its shoulder into the sand of the arena floor. He finished the chant to Updraft, jumping over the body of the colossal reptile as it slid past him, disoriented but mostly unharmed.  He stabbed downward with the spear and triggered one wind spike after another that sparked off its thick scales.  They might have damaged the lizard, but Micah doubted it.

  Landing, he spun and thrust his spear, launching another wind spike into the softer scales of the creature’s stomach.  This time, rather than sparks, Micah was rewarded with a trickle of dark blood as the enchantment on his spear barely cut through the creature’s armored hide.

  It flicked its tail in Micah’s direction, forcing him to throw himself face-first onto the sand as the blade whistled overhead.  Whispering the words to Root Spears with his mouth pressed into the floor, he was rewarded with a bellow of rage. The wooden stakes thrust upward from the arena and into the unprotected underbelly of the monster.

  Standing up, Micah used the moment of distraction to run toward it, firing an Air Knife into its lower torso as it tried to pull itself to its feet.  Another blast of light disintegrated a chunk of the arena’s wall as the monster tried to twist its head toward him.  Silently, he thanked his foresight in investing attribute points in both Body and Agility.  They might not directly improve his ability to cast spells, but without them, he’d have been annihilated by that breath weapon.  Twice.

  Up close, he unleashed a Sonic Bolt at the monster’s head as it tried to stand.  It stumbled, head drooping closer into Micah’s range as the vibrations rattled its skull.  He cast the spell again, causing the monster's eyes to blank entirely while its body dropped bonelessly to the sand.

  Smiling grimly, he sprinted to its head and was glad to confirm his suspicions.  The colossus had thick scales to ward off conventional weapons, but sonic attacks tended to ignore defenses like that.  Despite not doing as much damage as a sword or a spear, their vibrations ruptured veins and damaged organs with almost no regard for the armor covering those soft tissues.

  Adopting a ready stance of the Wind Spear style just in front of the monster’s head, Micah planted his feet and prepared his mana for the martial art.  He stabbed forward with all of his strength.  The Gale Thrust punched deep into the lizard’s unseeing right eye, hopefully drilling the spear into its brain.

  It jerked its head up, the pain from the spear lodged in its head waking it from the Sonic Bolt-induced stupor.  Micah gritted his teeth and held on to the spear with both hands, feeling it jostle back and forth deep in the creature’s skull as his weight wrenched the weapon to the side.  Hot blood sprayed across the arena as it screamed defiance at him, roaring at a volume and range that promised he would need an Augmented Mending to repair his eardrums later.

  Before Micah could complete the Sonic Bolt spell he was mumbling, the monster whipped its head to the side.  The spear lodged in its eye shifted with a sickening squelch sound before it caught, stuck in the lizard’s eye socket.  It jerked in Micah’s hands, but the combination of momentum and blood slicking the haft of the spear was too much.

  The slick wood slipped from his hands and Micah went flying.  There was a brief moment of weightlessness before he struck the arena wall with an audible crack of breaking bones.  Immediately, a sharp, burning pain erupted from his shoulder and stars filled his vision.

  Micah stood up, doing his best to ignore the sharp throbbing from his left side.  The creature was staring at him, its remaining eye clouded with rage while the other wept tears of dark blood around the spear.  Its head pulled back as it prepared to exhale once again.

  Micah sprinted toward it, ignoring the jolt of electric pain coursing through his shoulder with each jarring step.  Dodging to either side would be futile at this range; it could simply adjust its head to the left or right by a fraction of a degree and he’d be nothing more than a charred addition to the arena floor.  His only hope lay in the fact that every breath attack to date had been telegraphed by the creature first rearing its curved neck back before lunging forward to exha
le.

  It wasn’t a given, but it might be possible to get close enough to the creature that it couldn’t angle its head downward quickly enough to reach him.  The only other alternative was to try and find a way to deflect the blast, which was patently impossible with his current spell selection.

  The head thrust forward and Micah threw himself into a rolling skid, trying futilely to keep only his good shoulder in contact with the sand of the arena.  He gasped in pain as his body weight pressed down on the broken shoulder, blanking his mind.  Almost in slow motion, white light erupted from the creature’s maw, tracking a line in the sand toward him.

  He stared at the advancing beam insensibly, the pain radiating from his shoulder stealing his breath and preventing rational thought.  It cut out some five paces from Micah and left a trail of burbling, red-hot molten glass in its wake.

  The lizard wobbled, a spattering of scalding blood raining down on the sand around Micah from its wound.  Staggering to his feet, Micah put his good hand on the creature’s chest and unleashed a Sonic Bolt directly into its torso.

  Its head snapped at him drunkenly, the loss of blood and depth perception from its missing eye giving Micah enough of an edge to scamper away.  He cast another Sonic Bolt, this one from close range into the back of its skull. The part of his mind that was detached from the fight noted his dipping mana pools.

  With a crash, the monster slammed to the ground next to Micah. The impact of its fall knocked him from his feet and onto his injured shoulder once more.  His world flashed black, and stars filled Micah’s vision.

  Micah blinked.  His entire world was pain.  Beyond the red-hot poker lodged in his shoulder, his body was covered in bruises and abrasions.  In the supernova of agony, time was meaningless.  He might have been lying on the arena floor for a second or five minutes.

  Each breath lodged a molten spike of pain into his shoulder, the air hot in his lungs as it rasped past his ragged throat. His heart beat in his ears, and a low moan unconsciously rose from his chest.

  Without caring about the consequences, he cast Augmented Mending on himself twice, the first setting his shoulder and the second clearing up most of the internal bleeding.  Micah rolled over and pulled himself up to his hands and knees, coughing up blood.  At some point, at least two of his ribs had broken and punctured a lung.  One or two inches deeper and the bleeding would’ve been too much.  He would have never woken up from being knocked out.

  Pulling himself to his feet with a wince, Micah looked over at the monster.  Its chest still moved up and down shallowly, but it was clearly unconscious.  He limped over to it and cast Plant Weave, creating a rope of braided roots right in front of its head.  He picked up the rope, gritting his teeth in pain as his body screamed at him for bending over.

  With one smooth motion, he yanked his spear from the creature’s injured eye and shoved the length of roots into its place.  The other eye opened hazily as agony shocked it back to awareness.  Micah stared it down, smiling grimly.

  Without moving, he cast Root Spears on the rope.  It erupted in wooden thorns up and down its length, shredding the soft tissue and brain inside the gigantic reptile’s head.  Blood poured from the wound and hissed as it stained the arena floor. Its tail twitched once, and then the breathing stopped.

  Micah let himself slump to the arena floor, focusing on deep, calming breaths to avoid panicking now that the wave of adrenaline fled his body.

  Mist rushed into the arena, cooling Micah and quickly obscuring everything.  The diffuse light around him grew to an almost-blinding intensity.  Micah brought his hand back up to his eyes, shielding them.

  A second later, it was all gone.  There was no mist, and he was sitting in the room outside the boss’s chamber in the dungeon.  The only signs that the entire encounter hadn’t been in his imagination were the bruises and scrapes covering his body and the ornate wooden box sitting on the stone floor in front of him.

  Gingerly, he opened the box.  Inside were the fruits of his labor, the rewards of a goddess that he’d risked his life to please.  Two books.  Both had leather covers inlaid with any number of precious and semi-precious gems in intricate designs and bound with what looked to be a golden thread.

  When he opened the first book’s cover, Micah almost dropped it.  The first page was without embellishment, simply stating Temporal Power: Its Collection, Transfer, and Usage by Mursa, Goddess of Moon and Magic in plain but legible writing.  With shaking hands, he picked up the second book and opened it.  The title was less shocking, but Intermediate Daemon Summoning by Mursa, Goddess of Moon and Magic was still a work that would likely be worth hundreds of points of attunement.

  Micah flopped onto his back with a smile. Maybe there was a way forward that didn’t involve going to the Royal Knights after all.

  33

  Forging Forward

  This is a book that you should not be reading. The knowledge contained within is dangerous and forbidden for good reason. Summoning daemons from Elsewhere, while a potent art, cannot be done with any measure of exactitude. Even the most talented of ritualists could easily drain their entire life force by accident or fail in binding a daemon that they summon. For those brave enough to actually use this book, many of them will die at the hands of their own creations.

  Nevertheless, the reason why you have received this book is simple. My path has always been one of discovery. My brother Luxos believes that mortal society will evolve together, slowly achieving the perfection needed to rise above the nursery that is Karell. Ankros believes that conflict is like a whetstone, sharpening the best amongst you. As you seek to overcome progressively more difficult challenges, eventually, you will grow past your humble beginnings and join us in the heavens.

  For me, the answer has always been knowledge. Only through learning more about the world around them can a mortal purge their imperfect bodies and join us. Unfortunately, this is a project that by any rights should take several lifetimes if each mortal has to gather the necessary knowledge on their own.

  This is where Luxos has the right of things. Society protects people, but it also protects knowledge, almost never for purely altruistic reasons. No, the rich hoard books to give them an advantage in their petty little games with their rivals, and spellcasters create esoteric traditions to curate and protect the handful of secrets they manage to wrench from the cosmos in their short lives. Still, it builds up over time as individual grains of sand gather to form a desert.

  Ankros, on the other hand, makes his own compelling points. Luxos’ pawns are too worried about their rules and games of power. They amass knowledge, but first, they ensure that it’s safe, preventing anything with a modicum of risk from becoming publicly available. Without occasional existential threats to their very existence, most mortals would happily go about their everyday life without ever making major changes. That path is a dead end. If mortals are to make the leap beyond their station, they will need a kick. A reason to risk it all.

  The path forward lies in giving mortals the tools they need to make something of themselves as well as the motive to use it. If you’ve received this book, it is because I foresee dark times ahead of you. Daemon summoning won’t necessarily solve your problems—in fact, it might very well multiply them—but I suspect that you are running low on options.

  Remember, no knowledge is truly forbidden. Feared and respected? Yes. You should fear and respect your magic just as your enemies fear and respect you. Forbidden? That is failing the fundamental task that we, Karell’s Pantheon, have laid before you as mortals. You must learn and grow or die. Ultimately, stagnation is just as fatal as an arrow or disease.

  -Mursa, Goddess of Moon and Magic

  Micah closed the book thoughtfully. Even after reading it twice, he kept returning to the foreword. Both Intermediate Daemon Summoning and Temporal Power were very clear about what they were: a dangerous lifeline thrown to a drowning man.

  He sighed. Theore
tically, he should be grateful that Mursa was this blunt with him. Of course, that didn’t change the fact that her “brutal honesty” was arriving in his third timeline. Maybe he’d give the fickle goddess more credit if she’d actually hinted at what was in store for him his first time through.

  Of course, Micah thought as he massaged his temples and continued musing, he probably wouldn’t have been desperate enough to use the books if she’d given them to him in his first or second iteration. Sometimes there was nothing to do but shake his head at the bright and cheerful version of himself that had joined the Lancers, sure that he was destined for an ordinary life full of ordinary adventures.

  He’d been almost as naive when he threw himself at the mercy of the Golden Drakes. The implied promise of fame and security were all he’d needed to sign away his future, sight unseen, to a bunch of strangers that turned out to be calculating sociopaths. Even now, his reliance on the books provided by Mursa was probably the same brand of naiveté.

  Through everything, his abilities were just too perfectly tailored to his circumstances. Hells, Mursa had laid it all out in her foreword. Her plan was to give him the power and knowledge he needed to succeed, and then force him into impossible circumstances until he surpassed them or broke.

  The time travel, his affinities, the Ageless Folio—everything slotted together too neatly, like the brightly colored puzzles that woodworkers sold to children at the market. Mursa was giving him choices, but so many of them were such obvious dead ends that it would drive Micah to madness if he dwelt upon it.

  He stood up and strolled out of the cave, pondering the books. Really, they were too good to be true. Intermediate Daemon Summoning contained the theory and basis for rituals summoning Brensen and Luoca, the fourth and third tiers of daemonkind, respectively. Before he’d acquired the book, he’d only heard rumors of the Brensen, great clawed vultures that tore through veteran adventurers with ease. The records didn’t even mention Luoca beyond speculating that higher tiers of daemon likely existed.