Blessed Time: A LitRPG Adventure

by Cale Plamann

  “Then why in the name of the Sixteen are you wearing it?” Micah asked as he cast Wind Shield just in time to deflect an arrow. He frowned slightly. How in the hells did someone manage to shoot an arrow at him while running? One of their pursuers must have a blessing that let them fire a bow one-handed. It was the only explanation he could think of.

  Jo’s only response was another peal of laughter as she slid to a stop in front of a nondescript house and sprinted off into an alley. Micah rolled his eyes as he followed her, barely arresting his momentum in time to avoid slamming into the next building over.

  Behind them, their pursuers shouted something indistinct. Micah frantically mouthed the words to Updraft as he sprinted and squirmed past the refuse littering the narrow path between the houses. Just as the spell was triggering, he grabbed Jo’s arm and jumped, carrying both of them onto the roof of a nearby home before the spell fizzled out under their combined weight.

  Micah flopped onto his back, breathing heavily and staring up at the stars as he began to come down from the adrenaline of the chase. Next to him, Jo whipped off the hat and put her hand in her mouth, biting down to muffle the laughter that rocked her body. He glanced over at her and smiled.

  Even without the moon, Jo was beautiful in the starlight. The past two months had been magical. He’d raided a dungeon with the Lancers once a week, handling the Cavern of Rust on his own, but the rest of his time was devoted to these stolen moments with Jo.

  A night of mischief here, and a nice dinner there, and the years melted away. It was almost like he was back in the first time loop again, basking in the glow as the candle of Jo’s energy burned at both ends.

  “Did you see the look on his face when I grabbed his hat?” Jo hissed, her teeth faintly visible as she smiled at the stars above. “I couldn’t believe how big the oaf was. By the Sixteen, I swear that he was half Durgh and half Muskox.”

  “You know he’s down in the alley right now?” Micah whispered back, shaking his head slightly. “If we make enough noise, they’ll figure out we’re hiding up here.”

  “Oh, come on.” Jo stuck her tongue out at him. “I’ve seen you fight. Between the two of us, we could wipe the cobblestones with these yahoos.”

  “And then we’d have to explain what happened to the town guard.” Micah lay back against the rooftop, panting slightly. “Let’s save the adrenaline for killing monsters. I have enough problems without picking a fight with every minor guild in Basil’s Cove.”

  For a second, there wasn’t any noise but the muffled voices of their drunken pursuers, stumbling through the trash-filled alleyway. Jo propped herself up on her elbow, her eyes flashing as they hungrily traveled up and down Micah’s exhausted body.

  “If you aren’t going to let me talk”—she smirked slightly in the night air before crawling over to Micah—“I’m sure I can find something else we can do.”

  “Jo.” Micah’s eyes went wide. “There are five drunk people down there looking to skin us alive, if we’re—”

  His hushed words were stolen as her lips pressed against his. Micah briefly tried to struggle, but her hands were on his shoulder and his hair, the warm weight of her body pressing him into the shingles of the roof.

  Hours later, Micah stared at the stars once more. Jo had fallen asleep almost immediately. Rest didn’t come so easily to Micah.

  He chuckled quietly, trying not to wake Jo, while he remembered his first sixteenth birthday. Nerves had kept him awake almost the entire night. No matter how much he’d wanted to sleep, he couldn’t force it. The anxious energy had filled his mind with concerns and worries that paralyzed him for most of the night.

  Jo, on the other hand, managed to fall asleep while angry drunken adventurers tore up the dock quarter looking for her. It was something that he envied about her. She lived her life hard and without regrets. He might worry about whether he was taking the right course of action, but Jo would just do it and worry about the consequences later.

  Tonight was a great example. He honestly didn’t know whether he was still awake because he was nervous about the angry adventurers or because he was still trying to find a way to talk to her about his future.

  Of course, it might be the series of rituals he’d used to restrict his need to sleep. Even after he’d stopped casting the rituals, energy flooded his body from the portal humming in his chest. Every night, he slept less and less, and although he tried to avoid thinking about it, Micah couldn’t help but worry that his humanity was slipping through his fingers.

  It was true that he was becoming something greater. A mere human couldn’t gain levels or control the number of daemons like he did, but at the same time, he didn’t know exactly where his path ended. Hells, he didn’t know if it actually ended at all.

  He closed his eyes. Immediately, the darkness was lit up by the threads of fire extending from his chest toward the grove in the distance. Fifteen of them now. He ran his finger over the tethers. His hand wasn’t quite as red as the strings of fire yet, but it was noticeably darker than in the Cavern of Rust.

  Next to him, Jo glowed with the same quiet blue-and-green light as Telivern. Much dimmer than the deer, but given that no other human he knew glowed, something worth noting.

  He sighed and opened his eyes. Jo had her secrets. Everyone did. In three lifetimes, he’d seen nothing but consistency from her. There was no need to pry just because of his new senses. Plus, they’d have plenty to talk about come morning anyway.

  He closed his eyes again, following the chains of flame binding him to his daemons once more. Micah had hours to kill before sunrise and he might as well spend them on something useful, like trying to probe the nature of the tethers and the portal. Right now, all he knew was that they connected to Elsewhere and that they were changing him. An uncertain and worrying prospect.

  The hours flew by as he focused on each inch of the fiery bindings. Before too long, he found himself able to dimly sense the thrum of otherworldly energy passing through them. After drawing his attention deeper, Micah began to see the shapes of the daemons’ minds. He couldn’t touch on much more than their rawest and most primal of emotions, but even that experience gave him a blinding headache as he tried to make sense of their alien minds and desires.

  A slim hand grabbed his shoulder and shook gently. Micah blinked awake to Jo smiling contentedly down at him in the early dawn light. She’d propped herself up, hand holding the side of her head as her elbow rested on the cheap shingles of the roof.

  “Good morning, sleepyhead.” Her voice was soft, barely audible over the sound of Basil’s Cove waking itself.

  “I wasn’t asleep,” Micah replied, sitting up and shifting himself so his back pressed up against the house’s chimney. “You know I barely sleep.”

  “Well, thank you for protecting me all night, then.” She laughed, a quick peal of chimes, before she continued. “What were you worrying about this time? As great as you are, that’s your one problem. You’re always worried about what troubles tomorrow might bring. You never fully relax and enjoy the moment.”

  “What if I know exactly what problems tomorrow might bring?” Micah asked, a half-smile on his face. “If I knew what was coming, it wouldn’t exactly be irrational of me to worry about it.”

  “Nice try, Silver.” She blew a lock of her hair off her face. “Even if you know what plan the gods have in store for us, worrying about it won’t change anything. We’re grains of sand on a beach, afraid of the tide coming in. At the end of the day, we’re tiny, insignificant, and the forces that move around us are capable of shaking the cosmos itself.”

  For a moment, neither of them spoke, just resting in the quiet murmur of the city.

  “Did I ever tell you about Sarah’s and my childhood?” she asked, cocking her head with a slightly wistful look on her face. When Micah shook his head, she continued. “Our mother was an elf. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t spread that around. Elves aren’t the same kind of social pariahs that the Durgh are
, but that doesn’t mean that the Church of Luxos makes it easy for us.”

  Her voice lowered slightly. “Anyway, Mother was a kind soul. Too kind. After our father died of pneumonia, she took pity on a trapper that lost his way in a blizzard and got lost in the deep forest. He fell ill and she nursed him back to health. We spent almost four months with him while he recovered, but come spring, he was well enough to return to his community. He came back, though.” Briefly, Jo looked like she’d bitten into something sour. “While we’d been caring for him, he’d noticed the moonstone jewelry that all of us wore. That summer, he returned with a large party of adventurers. They killed most of our warriors, robbed our tribe, and drove us off of our land. For years after that, we were nothing more than refugees, preyed upon in every human kingdom we came across. Sometimes…”

  She looked away from Micah for a second before resuming her story. “Sometimes I wish that I’d killed that trapper. It would have been as simple as crushing up some bloodroot and silver ivy leaves and putting them in his tea. He’d have gone to sleep and never woken up.”

  Her eyes came back to Micah, laden with sadness. “It wouldn’t have mattered, though. I carried that anger around with me for years before I learned that humans had slowly been encroaching further and further into the deep forest. The trapper might have hastened the attack on our tribe by months or even a couple years, but the raid was inevitable.

  “Sarah’s sort of like you.” Jo crawled over to Micah and laid her head on his shoulder, watching the sun rise with him. “She’s convinced that if she becomes powerful enough, she’ll be able to stop something like that from happening to us again. That’s why she tries to play all of these games. I mean, she’s even flirting with that porkball Will. He’s ugly, clumsy, and acts like a child, but with his blessing, he’s meant for greatness. For Sarah? That’s enough.”

  “What about you?” Micah asked, running his fingers through her hair. “How do you make sense of all the awfulness in the world?”

  “I don’t.” She shifted slightly against him. “What will be, will be. I’ll fight what I think is wrong, but I’m not planning on getting myself killed struggling against some impossible fate. We’re all doomed to die anyway. Some of us are just more efficient about that process than others. My goal is just to make the best out of the meantime.”

  For almost a minute, they sat in silence as the sun crested the horizon and began to cast its warm rays down on Basil’s Cove. Finally, Micah interrupted the sounds of the city stirring.

  “I can’t say how”—his fingers stopped flowing through her hair, cradling her gently against his shoulder—“talking about it will only make things worse, but I know what’s coming, Jo. You’re going to die. Trevor’s going to die. My parents and my kid sister are going to die. Basil’s Cove is going to be destroyed. Unless I can stop it, the best-case scenario is that everyone we know and love will survive as refugees, and even that is a stretch.”

  She glanced up at Micah from his shoulder, her eyes seeking his as she looked for a sign of deceit or mockery. She pursed her lips.

  “For the sake of argument” —her voice was contemplative—“let’s say I believe you. How in the name of the Sixteen would you be able to stop it? You’re incredibly powerful for your age, don’t get me wrong, but anything capable of sacking Basil’s Cove is beyond any one person.”

  “You’ve only seen the weakest of my daemons.” Micah bit his lower lip. “I can summon even more after that. I’ve finally raised my level high enough that I can cast a ritual that I’ve been struggling with. I’m not sure it’ll be enough to protect Basil’s Cove, but it will at least give me a fighting chance. This is it, Jo.” He shifted, cupping her face with his hand so that their eyes met. “I finally have a real chance at saving us. At saving everyone.”

  “How?” she asked, confusion lacing the word. “What are we supposed to do to stop whatever it is you’ve seen?”

  “I have to summon daemons.” Micah smiled, but there wasn’t much mirth in his eyes. “I have to summon a lot of daemons. Then I have to bring them to the Great Depths and fight an army of Durgh amassing to attack Westmarch and Basil’s Cove. I don’t even really have to win, just do enough damage to make them think twice about attacking the surface.”

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?” she asked, a hint of a smile teasing the corners of her mouth upward. “By the Sixteen, whatever this vision was, you believe it enough to risk the Depths.”

  Micah just nodded.

  “Well.” She smiled back, her eyes flashing like gems in the early morning sunlight. “Just tell me when we’re heading down. That’s not an adventure I’m going to miss.”

  “Jo,” Micah said, frowning, “I don’t know exact levels, but the average Durgh are around level 20. The daemons can fight them, but you’ll get torn apart. I’ve literally already seen you die once. I’m not willing to do it again.”

  “Micah,” she replied, her voice snippy as she crossed her arms, “we’re more than just friends. If you think that I’m going to just let you run off into danger to ‘save’ me from the unknown, you have another think coming.”

  He frowned. “Jo.”

  “I’m not some sort of damsel in distress, Micah.” Her tone rose as her eyes flared. “I’ve been taking care of myself for years before I met you. I can handle fighting and hardship just as well as you.”

  “Jo,” he implored her, “if I go, I might die. If you go, you will die. I can’t take that again. Worse, I’ll be so worried about your safety that I'll be distracted. I won’t even be able to fight properly.”

  She frowned, opening her mouth to respond before closing it again. Finally, she turned her back to Micah and stood up. Tiptoeing to the edge of the roof, she glanced backwards briefly from the precipice.

  “Fine.” Her voice was a mélange of bitterness and sadness. “Have fun on your adventure. I’m glad I could at least send you off in style.”

  She jumped off the edge, catching a windowsill on her way down to slow her fall.

  “Jo—” The word was torn from Micah’s lips, but it was too late. Micah scurried to the edge where she’d disappeared. He glanced up and down the alley, but she was already gone.

  He sighed, running his hand through his hair. No matter how many lifetimes he spent with Jo, he felt that he’d never actually understand her.

  Micah pulled up his status screen as he began to cast Updraft to slow his own descent. Frowning, he stopped the spell. Where in the hells had that skill point in Arcana come from?

  42

  Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

  Micah sighed, taking in the collection of saplings that used to be the grove. Every dreg of temporal energy had been siphoned from the old-growth trees and into his collection of daemons. Dozens of Onkerts milled about, snarling and whining at each other as ten Brensens lounged indolently in the shade just outside the bounds of the grove.

  Next to Micah, the two Luocas—cicadas the size of an ox with the head of a man and the tail of a scorpion—stood silently, observing his forces with him. Each had taken an entire tree’s worth of temporal energy to summon them, and they chilled him to the core. Unlike the rest of the more bestial daemons, the Luocas could reason. When they weren’t under orders, he could hear them conversing in low, hissing voices that he couldn’t quite make out.

  As much as they disturbed them, he’d seen their speed and power. Even better, reality itself seemed to shy away from them. Their wings and tail seemed to soften or even melt matter that they came into contact with. Not enough to destroy what they touched, at least not immediately, but they certainly weakened anything they were striking. Micah didn’t really have a frame of reference for how powerful a level 60 Blessed was, but at least according to the book he’d received from Mursa, the Luocas were more or less their match.

  He reached down and ran his fingers through the dirt. Micah didn’t know if it was the act of tapping temporal energy from the great trees guarding the grove or
some other effect, but the rich soil of the clearing had slowly transformed into lifeless sand. All around him, ferns and grass struggled to take root in the loose and nutrient-free earth.

  They’d starved. Soon, the clearing would be devoid of all plant life, a brown-and-gray smear in the verdant green of the forest. After that, it was only a matter of time before the rest of the nearby ecosystem avoided the grove.

  It pained him to see what had been more or less his second home after Telivern and he moved out of the cave wither away, especially given his role in its destruction. Of course, that didn’t mean that Micah regretted his actions. Although his “army” numbered less than fifty daemons, it could almost certainly level Basil’s Cove on its own. Especially with him supplying support spells to his minions.

  That was another pleasant discovery of the last couple of weeks. He could cast spells that normally needed physical contact through the tethers that bound him to the daemons. It wasn’t entirely pleasant to think of the implications of that piece of information—that the daemons were inexorably linked to his soul—but every time he closed his eyes, his body illuminated the darkness like a bonfire. He barely slept or ate anymore, and when he rested, he could almost hear the daemons speaking to each other, like voices whispering just around the corner. Whatever was happening to Micah, he suspected it was irreversible at this point.

  With a whistle, he called the attention of the daemons. It didn’t really matter. His home was ash and he wasn’t entirely sure if he still counted as human, but Micah had successfully marshalled an army that could challenge the Durgh. If the price to save his friends and family was turning his back on everything that made Micah who he was, that was a bargain.

  The daemons stopped their activities and turned to Micah. Row after row of dully glowing eyes set in bestial faces, all waiting expectantly.

  “I don’t know how much you can understand,” Micah began, rapidly feeling sheepish about speaking to a collection of summoned creatures but too embarrassed to admit his mistake, even to himself. “I don’t know how, but I think I’m beginning to understand you. At least a little. You hunger for destruction. Unmaking what the gods have created. I haven’t summoned you without reason. Today we set out to destroy a great many beings that would otherwise hurt me.”