by Dmitry Bilik
I cast Mantle and reached for my Katzbalger.
Your Modification skill has increased to level 2.
Arts was biting her lip, suppressing a groan. It took all of my presence of mind not to rush to her aid. Because this must have been exactly what my invisible enemy on top of the hill expected me to do. They wanted me to lower my guard and turn my back to them. Snapdrakes don’t just lose their footing for no reason: there must have been a magic barrier here somewhere.
Which meant that we’d been expected.
I had 45 pt. mana, enough for three more time rewinds. Which didn’t bode well if I had more than a couple of opponents to tackle.
My heart was racing as I approached the hill, step by cautious step, sword at the ready. I blew a quick breath and lunged forward.
No one.
I must have been mistaken. The thought flashed through my head faster than I could grasp it — or was it even a thought?
My mind imploded.
REALITY RETURNED surprisingly quickly. Or so I thought. Still, it felt strange to say the least. I could still hear the sound of the sea; I could smell a foul, heavy stench hanging in the air but I couldn’t see anything. I tried to move but my hands were tied behind my back. What the hell?
“He’s come round,” a smarmy voice cooed.
Just as he said it, my vision cleared and I could finally see.
I was in a cave. A bonfire was casting shadows which danced along its walls. The floor was wet with something which glistened with the reflections of the flames. Further on, I could see a pile of heaped-up canvas bags. Next to them, Arts lay unconscious. A small pot was boiling on the fire.
A filthy-looking dude stood in front of me. He was short with sharp features and a predatory gaze. His large tatty padded coat streaked with crimson stains and a sailor’s shirt tucked into his short pants gave the overall impression of a Robinson Crusoe who’d gone bananas from solitude.
“I was afraid you might die,” he said. “What a waste of blood. The blood of a dead man isn’t as fascinating. Don’t worry, you will fulfil your destiny.”
“What destiny? Who the hell are you?”
Actually, I already had a bit of an answer to this question. According to my Insight, this was an Observer. But I needed more information.
“My name is Talsian. At least that’s what they called me before. Now my name is Please Let Me Go or What Do You Want From Me.”
He giggled again, making it perfectly clear to me that he was completely off his rocker. Talsian... Talsian... I had a funny feeling I’d heard that name before.
“People are so talkative these days,” he continued. “Everyone wants to have a good blab before they snuff it. They beg and plead, some even threaten me. Heh heh. But neither Seekers nor Commoners have any idea that they’re all but vessels for me. Vessels full of blood.”
Talsian! Now I remembered. The blood mage wanted for murders. Just my freakin’ luck. If before I had any hope of striking a deal with him, now it had completely disappeared. You couldn’t get anywhere with this idiot. Which meant there was only one way out, and that was death.
“Talsian, have you heard what Sachems say about blood?”
“What can those idiots possibly tell me?” he said with a smile. Still, I noticed him lean forward.
In theory, he was already within attacking range. Still, I wanted to play it safe. I lowered my voice. Now Talsian had to strain his ears just to hear the gibberish I’d started feeding him. Gradually he moved closer, cautiously step by step, until there were about fifteen feet between us. Close enough, in my estimation.
I knew I could cast Righteous Fire even with my hands tied behind my back. Don’t ask me how — I just knew it.
For a brief moment, light flooded the cave, allowing me to see the tiniest detail. The sacks heaped up by the walls were in fact human bodies. Most of them already dead, but some still alive. Admittedly weak and covered in cuts and bruises but alive.
Just then Righteous Fire expired. Once again the place was submerged in gloom, the weak glow of the bonfire a joke after the brilliance of the spell. Still, I managed to make out the mage’s motionless body, his blackened skin and singed hair, his burnt clothes fused with his body — and his charred arm with which he’d tried in vain to shield his face.
The problem was, Talsian had no intention of crumbling to dust as any regular Seeker would do. He stirred, cackled his horrible giggle and came at me.
Chapter 21
WHEN ALL ESTABLISHED and widely accepted rules begin to crumble, man tends to fall into a stupor. What would you do if you fired a Glock at someone’s head and he just brushed it off and walked away? All you’d do you just stand there with your mouth open trying to come up with a logical explanation of what you’d just seen.
That’s exactly how I felt right now. Righteous Fire dealt 5000 pt. damage, ignoring any kind of defenses. Considering the 30 HP the game had dealt me at the start of my “playing career”, this ability was a veritable wonderwaffle. And this bastard was alive and kicking. My attack had caused him some degree of discomfort, not much more.
“Silly, silly Seeker,” my barbecued opponent shuffled off and spread his arms wide.
Several of the bodies by the wall sprouted thin intertwining crimson threads which reached out to him. The moment they touched Talsian’s body, they disappeared.
He turned back to me. He now looked absolutely normal: no charred skin, no mangled face.
Oh no! He was a blood mage, wasn’t he? He could restore himself by syphoning his victims’ powers.
“How?” I asked mechanically. “How did you survive?”
“Silly Seeker doesn’t know who I am!”
“I do. You’re an Observer.”
“So why did you try to kill me, then? Ah! You knew who I was but you had no idea of the extent of my power, did you?” he cut his cackling short, pinned me with his stare and pointed his finger at me. “You don’t know who I am! You’ve no idea!”
“Tell me, then,” I said, testing my bonds inconspicuously. He might have been a good blood mage but his knotting skills wouldn’t make him a good boy scout. I might not be able to untie myself completely but I should be able to free up one hand. No idea what I was supposed to do with it, though, if this guy was virtually unkillable. But at least I should give it a try.
“I used to be a weak sickly child,” he began calmly, his hand fluttering in the air as if he was playing an invisible piano. Then his demented eyes focused on me as he rapidly blurted, “But why would anyone be interested in such petty details? I became a Seeker because I’d been chosen. That bastard Oracle can say what he wants. According to him, it was because someone got killed... but it’s irrelevant, anyway.”
“So that’s how you became an Observer,” I said, steering him back onto the right path.
“That’s right. Only it took me a long time to work it out. And then the Oracle... that bastard! That nasty, awful creature!”
“So you came to see him and asked him your question,” I realized.
“I did! He said I’d become the bloodthirstiest Player that had ever lived. The bloodthirstiest, can you imagine? But he also told me about this Observer thing. If I learned how to focus while observing something, I could improve my parameters, such as strength, mana and vigor, whatever I wanted.”
“Then you should have observed butterflies,” I said as I inconspicuously tugged my hand one way, then the other.
My comment seemed to have infuriated him. “I tried everything!” he splattered, his face distorted by anger. “Nothing worked. Nothing at all. And then one day,” his voice became soft and smarmy again, “I happened to witness a car crash. A heavy truck rammed a car, literally wrapping it around the guardrail. I just stood there watching as the woman in the car bled to death. That felt... wonderful. And then I received my first points which I could invest in mana. That’s when I understood that blood was the most powerful and potent substance in the world. The essence of life. And if
I wanted to become stronger, this was the element I had to observe.”
“Then you should have got yourself a job at a blood transfusion center,” I said, tugging at my bonds. They were almost loose.
“Five days later, I had my first kill. He was a commoner, a worthless tramp with no home or family. No one would have missed him. You’ve no idea how good I felt watching his blood flow from him.”
He closed his eyes in bliss, reliving his first murder. In the meantime, I freed my hand entirely and wiggled it to restore circulation.
“Then there was no stopping me. All those homeless tramps. Dozens, hundreds of them. I wasn’t in a hurry. After all, I had an eternity in front of me. But soon I realized one thing. The blood of society misfits ceased to bring me pleasure. It still gave me points to add to my stats. But the pleasure was gone.”
He tut-tutted and dissolved into soft laughter. “That’s when I drew the attention of the Guards. Apparently, you can’t kill commoners. Bullshit! Very well, so I switched to killing Seekers. But they didn’t like that, either. There’s no pleasing them.”
“Why did you kill the Oracle?” I asked, drawing my moon steel knife from my inventory and squeezing it hard.
“I came to tell him he was a charlatan. He should have explained to me the right way to use it straight away. He started telling me that the game had no provision for such abominable abuse. He was very chatty,” Talsian added with a predatory smile. “He told me lots of things. But most importantly, he said he couldn’t kill me. By then, I was already a serious student of blood magic. I bought a few things and improved a few others myself. Even now I’m in the process of creating new stuff,” he said vaguely, pointing at the pot boiling on the fire.
It was nothing special: two wooden supports stuck in the ground, with a strong crossbar from which the pot dangled. One would have thought there was something boiling in it but I could hear nothing.
“Aldoss steel,” the mage said, following the direction of my stare. “It’s used for making magic potions. It absorbs the energy of fire and transfers it to the potion I’m cooking.”
“What’s that? Something for diarrhea?” I asked without taking my eyes off him.
“This potion will allow me to draw blood runes by the power of thought alone. I’ll only need to think about it, and people will start bleeding to death — from their eyes, their ears, their noses, even from under their nails. I’ll enter a city, go straight to the main square and kill hundreds in one go. Imagine the beauty of it! Hundreds of people squirming on the ground bleeding! And then thousands! Tens of thousands!”
“Yeah, sure. You’ll outperform every cinema in the country with such a show. The problem is, you still need to live to see it through.”
There was no point in waiting any longer. Talsian was now wallowing in his sick wet dreams, completely unprepared for an attack. I gave him mental thanks for not tying my hands too securely.
As I staggered to my feet, momentum propelled me forward a couple of steps. A third step brought me face to face with Talsian, with my knife raised to strike.
Strangely enough, he didn’t appear to be scared. His face distorted with malice. But I’d already struck. The knife’s blade sank deep into his chest right up to the hilt.
“Silly Seeker.”
He spread his arms wide, then dropped them. My vision darkened; my temples began to throb, as if a hundred copper hammers were trying to planish my poor head. I could taste copper in my mouth. The world around me faded, losing color, as if trying to slip out of my control and dash off. Still, I held on. I did notice that my HP had plunged deep into the red, stopping at 12 pt.
“Had I not needed you, I would have killed you right there on the road. But I’m gonna prove to you that the Oracle was just a charlatan. Your blood will become the final drop in my potion.”
He lifted me by the scruff of the neck like a kitten and dragged me back to the wall where Arts was lying. He flung me onto the ground and bent low over me, so that I could smell his fetid breath.
“The Oracle said he couldn’t kill me. Said I was too strong for him. He said he was going to sacrifice himself. Because on the forty-seventh day after his death, a half-blood Korl would arrive. And here he is!”
He shook a finger at me, deadly serious, then dissolved into laughter and tousled my hair as if I were an old friend who’d just told him a funny joke. Then he grabbed me by the hair and brought his face close to mine.
“He was a charlatan,” he hissed, “And I’m gonna prove it once your blood joins all the others. A half-blood Korl, yeah right!”
He stepped a short distance away and cast a spell. Once again I saw the red intertwined threads reach out from a couple of people who were still alive — not toward the mage but to a simulacrum next to him which resembled a tall, naked muscle-bound man with a translucent crimson body.
“If one of these two moves, kill them,” Talsian ordered. “Did you hear that, half-Korl? If you as much as twitch, you’re dead. Don’t worry, I’ll be back soon. Your stupid attack deprived me of several fresh carcasses. I’ll have to go and get some new ones. The potion will be ready in a couple of days. That’s when I’m gonna need you.”
I was sitting close to Arts, afraid of even moving for fear of that translucent naked creature in front of me which was sporting a huge, er, potential. And Arts was just lying there, apparently without a care in the world. Now I not only had to get rid of our “guard” but also think of a way to defeat the crazy malefic. There was only one “but”: the most awesome imba toy in my arsenal had just proved to be completely useless. Which meant that I’d have to turn to the audience for help, a. k. a. to my more experienced lady friend.
“Arts! Arts!”
As if. And I couldn’t even shake her awake for fear of that giant thinking I was about to get up. What a shame I hadn’t studied water magic, otherwise I could have poured some water over her.
Never mind. I still had one rather useless spell. I held out my hand — which was the only small movement I could really make — and cast Light.
Your Illusions skill has increased to level 10.
You’ve achieved Mastery in the following skill: Illusions.
Mastery level: 1.
Now every fifth spell you cast won’t require any mana.
In all the thrillers I’d seen, stern interrogators would shine a light in the suspect’s face who would then cover their eyes and start blabbing away, eventually confessing all their crimes (and any other deadly sins). I quite frankly laughed every time I saw this. But there must have been some truth in all those cheap police TV serials because Arts stirred and groaned.
“Don’t move,” I said.
“What’s going on-”
“Lie still, I tell you!”
I was lucky in that Arts was a smart cookie, even with a busted leg and concussion. She opened her eyes. Her tired gaze focused on me, then moved around the cave, finally alighting on the monstrous nude hulk.
“If you move, this naturist is gonna kill us,” I said.
“That remains to be seen!”
“Yeah right. You think you gonna kill him? You’ve already broken a leg, and now you’re gonna bust your head?”
“Who the hell is he?”
“A blood spirit,” I read the Insight message, “with a blood aura. No idea what it actually means, though.”
“What if you tell me everything right from the start? Who’s invited us to lunch? And why do you keep going on about blood?”
I told her everything from the moment I’d come round in every sordid detail. For some reason, she didn’t warm to Talsian, either, and even promised to rip his appendage off and stick it where the sun don’t shine. Basically, her behavior was less than ladylike.
Then it was my turn to listen.
“This mage may be loco, but he’s incredibly powerful. If your 5,000-HP ability couldn’t even make a hole in him, then I just don’t know. How long has he been leveling blood? Not that it’s relevant r
ight now. What we need to do is smoke that transparent dude over there before his master arrives.”
“That shouldn’t be too difficult. Can’t you just fire something at him? You might not even need your grenade launcher.”
“I could, only I don’t think it’s gonna work. There’s something you need to understand. Blood magic is still not well researched but from what we know, it can be very powerful. This brute could have well over a 1000 HT while the commoner he’s hooked up to is probably less than 20.”
“How does that work?”
“Magic! Blood magic. Apparently, any creature that levels it has the potential to go sky-high. It offers everything for that. It can raise one’s mana, health and vigor to such an extent that a train crash would feel like a hiccup. Just as it happened with your Talsian.”