by Prax Venter
“Probably?” Lex asked, turning with a raised brow.
“Yeah.” He shrugged. “I got them there, gave her the boat, and then zipped straight back for you. I still don’t know what Velintanna was doing to you and, right now, I’m happy I didn’t waste one more second before stopping her.”
Lex only held him with her golden eyes and the fact that he couldn’t read what his wife and battle-bonded teammate was thinking frightened him to the core. Jack continued.
“Anyway. That doesn’t look like slopes to me. That Tower is not on a snowy mountain, or a bulging crag, which means it’s some other Town.”
“You’re right,” she said, nodding as she turned to stare into the night again.
Now that he had a frame of reference, Jack started turning clockwise slowly until he found the slightly darker shape of a distant landmass against the sky. There was no way they were running that far in less than two days, but this other unknown Town was probably reachable by morning, and its uncorrupted surrounding area was probably only a few hours away.
Jack -1 | HP 485/872
“Here,” Lex said as she stepped up close to him and laid her hand on his arm. She began humming softly at first, but it was as if the healing magic demanded she sing, and a wordless melody burst from her lips. Jack kept lookout as his wife made it clear to any Demons in the area where they’d stopped to rest.
Nothing came while she restored their life totals to their current maxes. After she’d stopped, Jack Inspected her again to find her with about a third of her mana left.
Jack -1 | HP 871/872
“We need to get out of this crap before you run out of mana,” he said, taking the first step toward the unknown Town. “And before we run out of life.”
The King and Queen of Blackmoor began jogging toward an actual destination, and despite not having a clue what to expect there, Jack felt more like himself than he had recently. Another 57 points of Weak Corruption Drain twisted away their existence before they came to the abrupt break in the world designating the meeting point of universe-eating infestation and pure Subroutine Sana.
Forward movement became increasingly arduous now that the ground was covered in dense foliage. Above, the mammoth coiled vines shifted to a healthy green with blimp-sized shadows attached near the highest points and the ground was virtually dry under these megaflora.
“They are flower buds,” Lex said as they continued to push through the overgrown briar with her nose in the air. “Each the size of The Eye back home.”
The longing in his wife’s voice for Blackmoor Cove pulled at his heart, and another pillar of his mind rewelded itself as he vowed to bend the universe to get them both back. Any Exit Alt would be perfect to use with this mysterious Tower looming ahead and would probably be the quickest way to meet up with his friends and family. After some time to think about Alt, Jack resolved the only real action he could take would be to merge a blade and see. He could ask for Lex’s current weapon, but then neither of them would be able to deal any damage and with her chained off-hand, they had too many handicaps as it was.
Just as the heady sweet fragrance and wild underbrush begun to overstay its welcome, the landscape became increasingly waterlogged and sucked on their boots as they walked. With the night clearing overhead and the giant vines thinning out, a swamp-like biome took shape around them. And the distant silver Tower still several miles away was a beacon of reflected moonlight shooting through swirling cloud cover.
The Tower clock interface indicated that every door to Floor 1 would open in a little less than seven hours, and it became a certainty that they weren’t going to get a rest bonus for tomorrow- something that had not happened since his first day in this warzone of a world. Larger streams and ponds started to fill in the landscape ahead along with evenly spaced mangrove trees, their impressive roots serving as stilts over the brackish water. Eel-things wiggled in the deeper parts and rippled the surface with their passing, so while their visibility rose dramatically, their options for free movement dwindled.
“I smell the sea now,” his wife muttered, trudging forward on the spark of her fierce will alone.
“Yeah,” Jack agreed as he angled their trajectory to account for the vanishing dry land. “We should stop and rest soon. We are going to pass out before we make it, and there is also the fact that this place is full of animal life. I don’t want to stumble into another rare wild creature in the dark.”
The Bastion only nodded.
About ten minutes later they found a substantial dry patch with a particularly massive mangrove crouching over its center. The trees of this biome weren’t anywhere as skyscraping as the coiled vines of the jungle they’d come from, but they weren’t mere saplings either. He watched a hand-sized emerald beetle with an impressive horn land on a nearby root and start eating the moss growing on the bark. This place felt old and established, meaning the Town they were approaching might have held this sustained higher-level for a while. He hoped to find sane and powerful allies in this one, but historically speaking, that was a bad bet.
They both sat against one of the thick cage-like roots of their chosen arboreal shelter then Jack summoned a torch to his hand and tossed it into the center. Flexing some of his new-found mental freedoms, he summoned another and tossed it near the first… and then another and another until he had a whole pile.
Jack sighed as they both stared into the flames and some of the combined warmth became trapped under their tree.
“I just invented a portable, instant, infinitely burning campfire.”
Her golden eyes moved from the dozen or so system-spawned torches to his and once again he saw only a glassiness there that made his stomach clench.
“Jack, something is bothering me and now is finally the time to talk about it.”
His wife had his full attention, and he watched her pull Molly the Moppet out of her 16-slot inventory and hold it up to be illuminated by the flames. “Why am I carrying around this Artifact?”
- 8 -
“You don’t remember winning that doll from a wooden claw machine in the Tower?” Jack asked, the clenching in his stomach becoming a gut punch.
Lex turned her golden eyes to the sewn girl and then back to his before shaking her head. Now he was seeing quaking fear from her. Jack continued.
“Do you remember Our World Arcade?”
“Of course I do,” she said, her darker brows coming down.
“Then… do you remember the night you held that doll out to Sol, Demi, and your father in order to convince them that your arcade idea was the way to go?”
His wife turned back to the flames, and he saw several emotions work across her face. Her unfettered confusion and terror drove him to hold his hand out to her.
Lex’s golden eyes snapped up to his hand and she instantly crawled over to sit in his lap with her chain dragging behind. Jack wrapped his arms around her, and she pressed them hard against her chest armor.
“She took memories,” Lex said eventually, and he knew she was crying. “Jack, she took… Not all of them, no. But how will I ever know what she took?”
Her small frame began spasming against him as his Bastion quietly sobbed into her hands. He didn’t know what to say, so only held her, but any of the psychosis and anxiety he’d endured today had now been replaced with a steel foundation of hatred.
It had always been personal, but this was a new level for the Corruption. With hardened mental armor snapping into place around the edges of his core existence, Jack made a realization.
“Lex, with what Velintanna has taken from you, I find that I am now more part of this world than I’d been before. I’ve watched you and Haylee and others chanting ‘this is our world’, but deep in my heart, I’ve felt like an outsider only watching good people find their freedom.
“Everything is… different now, and I think I’ve reached a new level of understanding about what Alt was trying to tell us. I can wrap my mind around that special twist of perception that the Corruption finds
abhorrent. This is my world, finally, and I am free to unleash my…”
Jack stopped as his voice left him and his eyes began leaking from the white-hot conviction racing through his mind and soul. Lex squeezed his arm and he continued.
“We are going to make this our world, Lex, but right now, I’m going to start telling you everything that happened between me and you ever since I landed on my ass in the rain. I saw your angelic face and the huge Tower before I passed out. Do you remember your side of that night?”
She nodded silently, tensing for the gaps, but Jack carefully walked her through what he knew of Lex and whispered many stories into her pointed ear as they rested in front of the campfire.
Other than their first date, their first kiss, and some initial acts of potent intimacy, most everything else Jack recanted for her seemed intact.
“Maybe she was erasing you,” Lex said as a pink pre-dawn saturated Subroutine Sana.
He shrugged. “Or saving the information for study.”
“Sing me a song that I’ve never heard from your world, Jack,” Lex said, gripping his arm suddenly. “Don’t think, just sing the first melody. Please.”
His brief time in the Cub Scouts flashed before his eyes, and one of the campfire songs from that distant memory floated to the surface of his digital mind. Jack cleared his throat and tried to put on a decent performance for his virtual love.
“I’ve been loading up the minecart
All the live long day.
I’ve been loading up the minecart
Just to pass the time away- hey!
Can’t you hear the whistle blowing?
You won’t need me much.
Can’t you hear the Foreman shouting?
Please don’t wake me up!
“Wonderful,” she sighed, holding her chained fist to her chest before she snuggled back against him. “Did you sing that before you went to your job as a mine explorer?”
“Ha- no. I did repeat it in my head a lot as we rode down into the depths of the Earth, but maybe we should have. It’s an old song sung to children when we’d purposely leave our homes filled with advanced technology to go experience ‘roughing it’ in nature.”
“And I’ve truly never heard that from you before?” she asked, leaning her head into his shoulder.
“Nope. First time.”
“Good. I need more of you to replace what I’ve lost.”
His wife sighed contently, and after about sixty seconds, her breathing grew heavy and rhythmic.
The King of Blackmoor let his queen sleep and shifted his eyes to the pile of torches generating heat and light indefinitely. Most NPCs he knew would never even think to fill all 16 slots of their inventory with system-spawned torches, but he wasn’t exaggerating to Lex regarding the jolt to his perception.
The plans for a hot air balloon controlled by adding or subtracting torches unfurled in his mind, and he envisioned attaching a torch chest to keep inventories free for the others. Tethering them to the ground would make elevators, or ridiculous watchtowers… or sniper nests.
He had an infinite heat source. The laws of thermodynamics were never something he paid too much attention to and left the grease monkey stuff to others, but he wondered what Alt would have to input. The spot where the AI had been still felt raw and empty, and after giving the question a moment’s thought, he realized that he had to discover the world for himself. What Alt said didn’t matter and would ultimately get in the way. Jack needed to get his hands dirty.
That’s what the Corruption hated- when someone’s mental capacity opened and craved deeper understanding or meaning. When an entity took a figurative step back from what they thought they knew and truly studied their world for what it was. Being told would have dulled its power. This concept was something he’d been told too, but now, he understood.
Nothing within the rules were off limits. Jack had never been more certain of anything in his life and with his Bastion cradled in his arms, his brainstorming became a fiery maelstrom driven by hatred.
Could a Level 1 cloth-wearing Hero strap a pair of Floor-50 shields to themselves with some rope like a sandwich board? Jack felt a flash of remembered boredom from a temporary gig he took as a teenager standing on a street corner wearing a ‘furniture liquidation sale’ sign draped over his front and back. The thing wouldn’t be in an equipment slot, so the system wouldn’t even be involved. Right?
Could they tie a bunch of raw logs together and make indestructible bridges- or even blockades across the sea? No. To be indestructible the thing would have to be woven from Tower-dropped gear. But could they sink boats? Should they?
Could he reinvent tanks or at least armored personnel carriers stuffed with ranged Heroes for swift, coordinated attacks?
The ideas came in waves but the warmth of his wife snoozing in his lap and the weariness of the insane day had taken its toll. Despite his best efforts to keep watch, his eyelids simply became too heavy.
It felt as if he were out for a moment of crisp refreshing blackness before Lex squeezed his leg and Jack ascended toward consciousness. She squeezed harder when she felt him stir and he knew to freeze.
After blinking away the remnants of his short nap, Jack saw an albino crocodile with six legs basking in the late morning sun just outside their mangrove-root shelter. The gaps between the wood spanned several feet so there was really nothing stopping it from trying to drag one of them into the water. Instead, its reptilian eyes were mesmerized by the pile of torches.
“What do we do?” Lex whispered, remaining as still as possible.
“It looks dangerous,” he whispered back. “But maybe if we move slowly, it will be afraid of us or the fire.”
He saw her blond head nod up and down. Jack responded by raising three fingers and counting down.
“Nice and slow,” he said as they moved in tandem.
The moment they shifted their legs, the thickly armored crocodile creature snapped open its mouth and scattered the torches as it zipped forward in a blur.
His Bastion grunted as the predator clamped around her leg, and Jack ducked and rolled away, giving her some room to swing her blade under the cramped root system. He watched Lex hack at its scaly head three times, and with no damage notifications, he felt the pressure to drive his boot into the predator’s meaty tail.
It responded by pulsing out a sharp red glow and then swept him off his feet with an ability-imbued tail attack.
Jack -35 | HP 837/872
The dry dirt came up to slap him in the back hard and he blinked up into the shade of the roots a few times before checking a flashing icon in the corner of his vision.
Ivory Baezlik Swat - [ Stunned | Incapable of action or perception | 00:00:02]
The effect ended before he could even read it and he sat bolt upright in time to see his Battle Queen deal enough damage to trigger victory. The vicious lizard vanished in white noise static leaving behind six huge hunks of vivid red meat and a folded-up swath of its pre-skinned hide.
“Are you okay?” Jack asked, getting back to his feet.
Lex nodded, panting out, “However, I will run out of mana at some point. I still hold the Druid’s Lingering Light helm that gives me a chance to regen MP on kill, but we need to get to that Town. Any Town.”
Jack gathered the scattered torches, the meat, and the hides into his inventory; she healed their wounds with a magic-infused song, and they both stepped out into the daylight. The sky was an acid blue that stung his eyes after not sleeping, but their visibility jumped dramatically. He picked out the white snouts of several other Baezliks either submerged or sunbathing partially camouflaged on the ash-hued dirt latticing though the mangrove marsh.
The white-barked trees stood equidistant apart as if they’d all been planted that way as strips of land interconnected with randomly distributed mini-islands. Turning right, he saw that the land and trees thinned out until a distant blue ocean took over. There was no mistaking the cooler salty breeze coming from
that direction. To their right was more swamp for a few hundred yards before the magnificent green tendrils they’d come from filled in everywhere else. Now that the sun was out, pink and white blossoms like enormous satellite dishes cast deep shadows into the twisted briar below them.
And ahead was the silver thread of infinite Tower reaching up through the sky until it thinned out into an impossible line.
Jack and Lex triggered two more encounters with the sharp-toothed creatures on their progress through the mangrove marsh, but now that they knew the animal’s capabilities and were not napping, both were handled with minimal damage.
It wasn’t until they got closer to the white log wall of the unknown Town that the Ivory Baezliks dramatically grew in number.
“I really wish I could take you with when I Teleport,” Jack said, turning back from his survey of their difficult path ahead. He found Lex nodding as she stared down at the chain wrapped around her left wrist.
“Hey,” he said, her red-rimmed golden eyes shifted up to his. “We’re going to get through this. The only way to get back at Velintanna is to overstuff that pretty head of yours with a lifetime of memories. I’m watching that golden hair turn grey, damn it.”
She smiled at him and took a deep breath. “With your heart and my beefy brawn, we will prevail. Now how do we cheese these beasts and get to that Town?”
His eyes widened. “Not cheese, but maybe fish?” Jack said, summoning one of the 50 raw fish he’d personally pulled from the depths of Blackmoor Cove. There was still a chance that these foreign fish from across the game world wouldn’t draw the attention of the six-legged snappers, but once he hurled one into a clump like a star quarterback, the creatures actually fought each other over the morsel.
With a grin, Jack handed Lex a flopping blue fish and then bade her to follow him with a sideways nod of his head. The King and Queen doled offerings to the baezlik citizens of this Town coming to greet them, and his Bastion couldn’t stop giggling as they flung fish in every direction.
They jogged through the gap in wildlife they’d created and found a twenty-yard wooden walkway that led up into the Town Gate. Given the endless body of water to his right, he had to assume the entrance faced South and potentially the other edge of the map. The weathered boards ended in a short set of wooden stairs, and as they drew close, it became clear that this entire Town was suspended on stilts behind its Wall. Jack’s eye settled on the sets of red pumpkins lining the stairs to either side standing out in high contrast to the white of the pristine mangrove wood.