The Beginning (Dark Paladin Book #1) LitRPG Series

by Vasily Mahanenko

  I heard you,” I said coldly. “We are together only till we get to the Chancellor, right?”

  “We from different worlds. Different classes. Different teachers. Different everything. Don’t see future interaction. Will help to meet teacher. He’ll tell about Game. Then on your own.”

  “In this case, could you explain why in hell do you need me?” Marinar returned to us. “Devir kills any mage who doesn’t follow his orders. His order was simple and clear: kill Yaropolk. That is you. I will not comply with it, since the agreement proscribes it. It’s impossible to change class, so as a mage I don’t exist any more. No one will accept me as a student. What’s left is alchemy. So that’s what I have to work on. But even that will not save me without an anchor point, so I simply don’t understand why you need me!”

  “You are our keymaster! You help us, we help you. Everything is transparent here,” I cut her off, involuntarily cringing from Zangar’s words. The necromancer was right in calling a spade a spade, but damn, it was surely unpleasant to hear all that! In my head I was already making certain plans for life after the Academy, but Zangar had just destroyed them all. “Let’s do this: first of all, let’s get to the remaining teachers and the Chancellor; then we’ll work out everything else afterwards. If no one has objections, let’s set out. We are wasting precious time.”

  In total silence broken only by trifles like “here” and “follow this beam” we went through all the teachers, both open and hidden ones, to the point where Marinar received the status of a keymaster. Of course, we did encounter a glitch: the teacher refused to hand the first key to her, stating that the group leader was already a keymaster and there couldn’t be two keymasters in the same group. We had to reassemble the group, making Marinar the leader, but even this funny situation couldn’t break the ice of distrust that had appeared among us. As for the clearing criss-crossed by the guiding lines and located right at the edge of the abyss, it took me an hour to find it. It looked exactly the same as the one from which Zangar had pushed me off; the only difference was its symmetric location with respect to the bridge into the Labyrinth.

  “Teacher knew this not,” Zangar noted philosophically, looking beyond the edge of the abyss. “Thought there was one passage. Was wrong. When I return I can surprise him. Will get a reward.”

  “Throw her,” I ordered and before the girl could squeak in surprise and protest, the cynocephalian grabbed her hand, lifted her in the air and threw over the edge. We heard a wild scream, a dull thump, and indignant curses, which quickly turned into a shriek. My assumption about the abyss was correct: the fear of heights was induced rather than a congenital feature for me. Zangar turned towards me, planning to repeat the throw, but I stopped him in time: “I’ll manage myself. Go to her, lest she fall off.”

  The necromancer jumped down to join the girl, allowing me to approach the edge unhindered. The invisible road was about four meters below the edge of the abyss. Zangar, his legs stiff with fear, came up to the screaming Marinar, threw her over his shoulder and literally shuffled towards the other bank of the abyss. The cynocephalian was afraid, yet he overcame his fear, and with a determination worthy of better use kept moving forward. I took a deep sigh and stepped forward into nothingness. A jump from four meters didn’t seem extraordinary any more: the years of training did help. What bothered me was another thought: would I be able to repeat the “heroics” of the cynocephalian and ignore my fear?

  I was. Despite activating my “Spiritual integrity” attribute, the trembling and fear of heights appeared as soon as I landed on the invisible road. Knowing that the emotions I felt were induced rather than real, I lifted my head, saw Zangar in the distance and, holding myself up on arms that were shaking and threatening to give out at any moment, crawled after him. I didn’t have the strength to stand up and walk along the road. Even closing my eyes didn’t help me get rid of the induced sensations, so all I could do was clench my teeth and crawl at a snail's pace.

  “You didn’t train,” Zangar calmly remarked, as soon as I plopped down on my back, drawing a relieved breath. “But you made it. Second attempt. Me, twentieth attempt. You are stronger.”

  “How do you get used to this?” I rasped, trying to overcome the shakes. Fifty meters over the abyss took its toll: I couldn’t get my breath back; my heart beat madly as if trying to jump out of my chest and bounce around on the ledge spraying everyone with blood; colored circles danced before my eyes, reminding me of a kaleidoscope with colored glass I had as a kid.

  “The fate of necromancers — always fight. Fight fear. Fight the dead. Fight yourself. Never give up.”

  “It’s nice to talk about fear when you are an initiated minion,” Marinar piped up in a trembling voice. For her the trip along the invisible road hadn’t been easy either. “You should try it as we did, without training, without preparation without a teacher. Then try and talk about fear and fighting it.”

  “You’re wrong, human,” Zangar responded. "Have no initiation. Here we similar. I can die too.”

  “Oh, really? Then why…”

  “Enough,” I grimaced, rising to my feet. “Marinar, open the door and stand in the doorway so that it won’t close. I’ll try to run through the traps using the tactic we tried before. If I die, the entrance door will be opened and there will be no need to activate the second key. Zangar, think: what else can you tell me about the Academy without breaking your teacher’s orders? You said yourself – regardless of the prohibition from the Chancellor, your teacher found a way to get around it and convey the right ideas to you. Don’t you have enough imagination to figure out how to get around that? For example, cynocephalian language is so complex … I am telling you formally: before I entered the Academy, I had no idea about it, however remote. So if I were to suddenly see some hooks, loops and other scribbles, I wouldn’t even know that it was an inscription of some sort in front of me. And note, in this case no one would be able to tell anything to anyone, nor transfer anything to anyone. Think about it. Fine. I’ll be going now.”

  The obstacles in this corridor were practically identical to those in the previous one; that enabled me to get to the very end of the corridor without a problem. The only difference I encountered was simultaneous activation of the fire, compression and shooting traps. The shield held against the assault, but the Book took a long time figuring out a safe way to get through this; I ended up having to activate the traps multiple times to determine the pattern.

  “I’m through! Wait there!” I shouted stepping over the last trip wire trap, keeping my eyes on the center of the cave. There, on a small pedestal, a thick book was sitting, somewhat similar to my artifact. Even in the dim light it shone with all the colors of the rainbow, drawing the eye and begging to be grabbed and read. Actually, that was what bothered me most: I knew firsthand what a fishing lure was. Dampening my desire to rush to explore the pedestal immediately, I lowered myself to my knees and slowly, like a minesweeper for whom making mistakes is not an option, started exploring the stone floor. Despite the last trap, the passage through the corridor looked too ordinary, without any tricks. If I had been the one entrusted with installing the traps, after the first one activated it would have at a minimum collapsed the cave and everything within it under an avalanche of stones. Because no one should hang around where they aren’t welcome!

  A thin wire, which continued from the trip wire trap and led somewhere to the side, caught my eye accidentally when I was already getting the impression that there was nothing scary or horrendous in the cave and that all that was keeping me from obtaining the book were my own fears. My speed dropped practically to nothing: whereas before I explored primarily the floor now I worked on the wall as well, as the wire blended into it so well as to be basically completely invisible; sometimes only my spatial imagination indicated to me where it would go next. Having circled the cave for about 90 degrees with respect to the entrance, I discovered the object of my search: a thin support between the ceiling and the floo
r; a taut wire was attached to its bottom end. Moreover, there were some more wires leading to the support; they went in different directions and indicated that the trap at the door was the most visible and obvious one.

  The Book of Knowledge appeared in front of me practically on its own accord; it must have learned to anticipate my thoughts by now. In the previous cave I had stumbled over the wire by tumbling onto the floor, yet nothing horrible had happened. That begged the question: why? Had the trap already been deactivated by earlier players? Or would nothing horrible happen once the wire dislodges the support? The artifact started replaying the video in slow motion, and one more time I promised myself that I’d be more thorough in my explorations. My attention had been fully occupied with the book I had found; I had not inspected the cave in detail. I just looked the space once over to see if there were obvious oddities, found none and returned to the pedestal again, thinking of how to retrieve my loot. However, this review of the video showed me that even in a space explored by other players there’s always something that needs to be studied.

  For example, the previous cave had nothing where this one had the support. At least, so it seemed on the face of it. However, once I zoomed in, there was a fascinating sight in front of me: in the shadows cast by uneven wall surfaces there was a rough-hewn statue of a cynocephalian, acting as an Atlas. His arms raised, he held up the ceiling that threatened to collapse; the expression on the face of the dog-headed creature was more eloquent than any words. Despite the rough carving and the impossibility of zooming any closer, one could see the tension felt by the model of the statue. The sculptor was so extremely skillful in conveying the inhuman effort exerted by the cynocephalian that I was starting to feel unbidden respect for this Atlas. Unfortunately, when the fire burnt us up I was looking in the other direction and never saw what happened to the statue: had it stayed in place or was it also destroyed by the fierce fire?

  Stepping carefully over the wires, I went around the support and stood in the empty spot of the statue. Something was telling me that it was standing there for a reason. Once I turned towards the center of the space, I shuddered inside: the cave was criss-crossed with yellow rays of light, randomly shining out of the walls; that was the only point from which they were visible. Logic suggested that if I were to touch even one of those rays the cave would have been buried. There was a reason a support was there. Following my instinct more than logic, I decided to copy the statue’s posture. What if I had to make one like it? Then the Book of Knowledge could tell me the proportions. Having checked once more the position and emotions of the statue in the previous cave, I raised my hands and made a tense grimace. Not knowing how sensitive and fragile the ceiling was, I decided to touch it just with the tip of my fingers, simply to record the dimensions. What if it were to burst like a bubble? Following that thought, I even took off my armor gloves for improved sensitivity and a more tender touch. The surface of the ceiling was cold, hard and rough; it was obviously not going to crack or burst. After a few experiments, I placed my entire palm on the surface; however, I received no secret messages or epiphanies. The ceiling remained hard, fully pretending to be a stone. I made sure that the Book recorded the potential size of the future statue and the directions of all the beams within the cave, I extracted my glove out of the inventory and, before putting it on my hand, tapped it on the ceiling lightly, knowing that I was simply losing time with all those precautions. Something had to be punished for that; so why not the ceiling?

  What saved me was that at the time of the impact the glove was not touching the rest of the armor. The tap turned out to be quite impressive: sparks flew, something crackled, there was acrid smoke, but everything disappeared in an instance, leaving me to face the ceiling and a roughly hewn stone glove. Wait. Stone? My chest contracted and my heart dropped to my boots, once understanding came: had I touched the ceiling not with my bare hand but with the hand in my glove, all my armor would have turned to stone. The Book of Knowledge appeared in front of me again and I looked at the statue more carefully. Its face was the only finely worked part of it, and the longer I looked the more certain I became that it was not stone. It was the figure of a player, desiccated to the point of looking like a mummy, trapped by his armor which had turned to stone. The Game prevented him from respawning, and just now I had barely avoided his fate of becoming one more museum piece.

  Apparently, the cave ceiling, like Midas of Phrygia, turned all non-living matter to stone; the player garbed in his class armor not only could not move, but could not even commit suicide to respawn. For some reason the level of Energy for the trapped player didn’t go down.

  “Zangar, do you know anything about this?” I returned to the group and attacked the necromancer with questions, waving the stone glove in the air. “Cynocephalians, as far as I understand, are not so many as to occur in such exotic places. The Book is telling me that you are actually the only representative of that people in our sector of the Academy. Or is this forbidden as well?”

  My imperturbable partner just shrugged his shoulders and looked away, when suddenly Marinar stepped forward.

  “Offer me a trade – I am still not very good at doing this. As far as I understand, you are an explorer, so I decided to take a video for you, as I found a very interesting rock on that wall. Take a look right now, please. You should like it. I need to know if I am a good operator or not. If not, there are plenty more stones around.”

  With undisguised surprise I accepted the video record from the girl, worrying all the while about the sanity of our team. One of them looks away without bothering to answer, the other videotapes rocks and then runs after me demanding that I look at her creative efforts and give her the Oscar for Best Director. Marinar was looking at me so intensely and demandingly that I had no other choice than to spend a few minutes to take a look at whatever she recorded there. In order to treat the mentally sick you need to first play along, so that they would trust you. After all, she was the keymaster, and we needed to somehow pass through the cave criss-crossed by those rays. The book processed the video and the following picture appeared in front of me:

  “Oh! Yaropolk, I am sure, will like this stone!” The video started by showing a very ordinary common rock – there were plenty of those on the ledge. Apparently, our troubles had taken their toll on the girl. A pity!

  “Marinar!” came Zangar’s guttural voice, and it was a moment before I realized that he was not speaking in the common language. “Do you understand me?”

  “No. I think Yari might not like this stone,” the girl continued recording her video, ignoring the cynocephalian’s question.”It’s too ordinary after all. Oh! Take a look at this one! It has a lot more facets!”

  “That’s a pity,” Zangar started again. “No one to even talk to. You don’t know my language. Cannot understand me. Won’t tell anyone. Danger ahead. Cannot warn. Teacher prohibited! Don’t know what to do. But you can’t advise. You don’t understand.”

  “The facets are not so fine; I need to film something else,” Marinar went on once Zangar paused, but I didn’t listen to her voice any more. That was so clever of them! The necromancer had found a way, after all, to share information without breaking his teacher’s order!

  The video lasted twenty minutes. While in the beginning I was all excited about the information I was about to learn, after it ended I had a persistent thought that perhaps it would have been better had the cynocephalian said nothing to me. Because sometimes knowledge is not only power, but also a major headache.

  Recruits were personally assigned to the sectors by the Viceroy based on the recommendations of one of his deputies. By the way, there were four Viceroys in the Game, each responsible for his sector: biological, energy-based, ephemeral and other-worldly life forms. Levard, Zangar’s teacher, was a deputy of the Viceroy for the biological sector, and was responsible for relations with humanoid lifeforms. Based on his recommendation Zangar was sent into the 3rd sector of the Academy, where Levard had trai
ned at some point. The essence of going through the Academy was simple: only the strongest, craftiest, cleverest or richest players stayed in the Game; there was no place in it for others, and the Game reverted them back to NPCs. According to the necromancer, souls were immortal. However, the Game would try to distinguish those who took risks: if a non-initiated player were to complete the entire sector and reach the center of the Academy, he would receive a gift from the Chancellor that would be useful in the future. Generally, the Academy was divided into four stages: forest, Labyrinth, wastelands and the Chancellor’s castle. Each of the stages had both open and hidden bonuses, some of which we had found. The ones we hadn’t been able to find were the auction and a couple of traders. There were certain subtleties in the course of completion. For example, it was impossible to pass through the Labyrinth without a sacrifice. Levard had entered the Academy with two initiated minions and left with only one who had been his steady companion ever since. The third cynocephalian was left in the Labyrinth. As a sacrifice. Zangar saw the lost companion of his teacher when we were in the previous cave but hadn’t brought it up, as he thought that we would move along the road that was already known to him. When I decided to change the plan and found a new passage, the necromancer had planned to use Marinar as the sacrificial lamb, despite the agreement. After all, the agreement was made between Marinar and myself, not Zangar. But now the necromancer was having doubts about his initial decision, even though it was pointless to go through the case if you didn’t have a victim. According to him, the best thing to do would be to go back, find another player, make him the keymaster and go through the passage we had used first. Because passing through the first test of the Labyrinth was extremely difficult.

  But that wasn’t the worst thing in the video describing various stones. Wasteland was not an allegoric name; that area was literally a wasteland. It was a flat land, stretching all the way beyond the horizon; groups of Light or Dark beings wandered through it. Light ones hated the Darks ones and would try to destroy them; the Dark ones would respond in kind. However, neither was in favor of “mixed marriages”. A Dark one and Light one couldn’t survive in the same group. That was an axiom of the wastelands. The groups traveled in accordance with certain rules, which one could follow moving with a group of some beings of the same kind and retreating in case of an unexpected battle; however, we would have to part ways in order to survive. As it was currently, our group wouldn’t make it.