Gods of Myth and Midnight: A LitRPG Novel (Seeds of Chaos Book 3)

by Azalea Ellis

  A new section of the hill crumbled away, again leaving words behind.

  Torliam examined it for a moment, then began to read. “You must cultivate these seedlings with the blood-borne powers bestowed on you by the Goddess of Testimony and Lore. Each seedling will grow around the others, creating the nine-part…I don’t know the last word. No part of it may die. If it grows strong enough to sustain itself, you have succeeded. Begin now.”

  I stepped forward, crouching over the “seedling” placed in front of me. It looked like a clear marble, unlike the others, which had colors or even texture on the inside. “Do you understand what he means?”

  Torliam reached down slowly and picked up his seedling. It had green threads and little sparkles of color like the stars seen through the atmosphere on the level of the Spire of Prophecy.

  Seeing that it didn’t hurt him, the rest of us picked up the ones in front of us as well.

  “I believe we must push power into these to feed them, similar to how my people push power into runic arrays or other devices to power their effects. I have some experience with this.” He jerked in surprise, and the rest of us did the same, as the seedlings pricked us, just like a normal Seed did when injecting its contents into you.

  I focused my awareness on the spot of pain, wondering if some invisible Seed material was filtering into my bloodstream even now. I found nothing, but a couple seconds later, a Window popped up in front of my face.

  ACCESS TO THE FOLLOWING SKILLS RESTRICTED: SPIRIT OF THE HUNTRESS, TUMBLING FEATHER, WRAITH, CHAOS

  Adam, Jacky, and Sam’s eyes all flickered over something invisible in front of their own faces, which I assumed to be similar messages to the one I’d just received.

  Torliam rubbed at the already-healed spot on his palm where the seedling had cut him, then at his chest. “Something has happened. I feel strange.”

  He didn’t have a VR chip like us, I remembered. “It just cut off my access to all the Seed-based Skills except for Voice. I’m going to assume it did the same to the rest of us.” I forcefully kept myself from hyperventilating, wondering if, somehow, this was another dream. I looked down at my left hand, and managed to partially reassure myself with the honeycomb scales on my skin and the sixth finger. I never had those in the dreams.

  At that point, Adam’s legs collapsed underneath him. He barely managed to stop his head from banging into the rocky ground. He let out a string of curses, struggling to maneuver and lift his torso up with his arms while keeping one hand clenched around the seedling that had just caused his misfortune.

  The kids and Zed only had the one Skill, so nothing had changed for them. But for Adam, Torliam, and myself, our Seal of Nine Skills weren’t exactly combat related.

  “This is ridiculous,” Adam snapped. “How the hell am I supposed to get through a Trial without any of my useful Skills?”

  Torliam was pale and kept rubbing his chest. “While I also find this disturbing, it seems that we do not need the other Skills. Perhaps this is a test to see if we have properly strengthened the powers of the Seal of Nine. Nine Skills, for each greater Trial.” He frowned with concentration, and the shiny ball in his hand changed shape, sprouting a tiny little stalk, a couple leaves, and roots. “See?”

  As soon as he looked away from the sprout, it started to wither. He turned his concentration back to it, and it regained its health.

  “You’re supposed to plant things in the ground,” Zed said. “Maybe it needs soil and water.”

  Torliam immediately crouched down and dug a little hole in the arid ground, then placed the sprout in it and covered its roots. Nothing happened, and when he pulled away it started to wilt again. He pushed more power into it, and it perked up, growing a couple more inches. This time, it took longer to start wilting when he pulled his hand away. “You must join me. ‘Each seedling must grow around the others,’” he quoted.

  We grabbed some of the empty plastine containers from our supplies and crushed them together into a makeshift chair for Adam through sheer physical strength. At least our Attributes hadn’t been decimated, too.

  I knelt down next to him and dug my own hole into the ground. I placed the clear seedling in it, covered it mostly with dirt, then touched the top of it with my finger. Feeding power into it wasn’t difficult. I reached for Voice, as if I were going to try and say something cool, and the seedling greedily sucked at the power. I fed it a little more, pushing along that same channel, and it sprouted. I could feel its roots digging into the hard ground as its stem and leaves stretched upward toward me.

  Zed grabbed some of our precious water from his pack and moistened his patch of dirt before doing the same, and then the others all followed suit. We pushed power into the little sprouts till they grew about a foot high. Each crystalline sapling was slightly different from the others, and each of them reached for the others like they were reaching for sunlight, intertwining their branches and then, when they grew taller, their trunks.

  We stepped back to look at the admittedly beautiful sight, which stood out even more in this wasteland.

  Gregor said, “How big does it need to get before it can sustain itself? Normally, I’d think that the root system needed to reach a source of water and nutrients abundant enough to support future growth, but I’m not entirely sure what this thing is made of and this dirt doesn’t seem exactly rich.”

  Sam, who had activated Black Sun to feed his portion of the tree, shrugged. “Maybe it doesn’t eat anything but Skill power. Maybe that’s why we’ll be staying here for the rest of our lives if the little guy has anything to say about it.”

  I didn’t say it aloud, but internally I waited for things to take a turn for the worse. The Trial couldn’t be as simple as feeding power to a tree. If it was, there wouldn’t have been the clause about giving up at any time, and there’s no way it would have counted as a “greater Trial” for each of us.

  Sure enough, after we’d each been feeding our part of the nine-part tree for about an hour, taking little breaks to make sure we didn’t exhaust ourselves, little motes of light floated toward us. I didn’t know where they’d come from and hadn’t noticed their arrival, but they coalesced around and landed on the tree despite our efforts to shoo them away.

  The tree immediately started to wither where they touched it. Without Chaos or any of my combat Skills, all I could do was reach out with my bare hands and try to crush the little light motes.

  Luckily, despite the glow coming from them, they didn’t seem to be made of actual light, and succumbed to my squeezes like any other bug.

  Still, there were too many of them to crush one by one and still keep the tree alive.

  Birch let out a low yowl and the wind picked up, blowing the light bugs away from the tree and out into the wilderness. This helped a lot, but many of the ones who’d already reached the tree clung onto it and continued to drain its vitality.

  My section, a crystal-clear sapling, was drooping limply and losing some of its leaves, and many of the other sections were doing even worse, like Birch’s and the kids’. “Damnit! Get the hell off my tree!” I snapped. Voice kicked in, sending my words vibrating out through the air.

  The motes lifted up and flew away, all at once, like they’d been frightened off.

  I watched at their retreating formation. “Oh. So that’s what the Trial’s about.”

  Zed had started calling the tree Yggdrasil after the mythical world tree that connected the nine realms. It came as no surprise that the light bugs weren’t the Yggdrasil’s last attackers. They came in waves, their forms different each time, but always a little larger and a little stronger than the wave before. Their bodies grew more typically monstrous, and some of them even had non-physical abilities not so dissimilar from Skills.

  When we killed them, their carcasses melted into the ground after a few hours. We speculated this may have been a form of nourishment for the tree, but without access to most of our Skills, we had no way to be sure. Yggdrasil took longer t
o start wilting as it grew larger, but still required us to feed it our power to stay alive and grow.

  This continued over the course of days, the longest Trial we’d ever participated in, and in many ways, the most grueling. Those on the team without high Resilience and a heavy concentration of Seeds augmenting their bodies simply couldn’t keep up. The kids had been mostly removed from the fighting, their time divided between fueling their sections of the tree and sleeping. Gregor continued to have nightmares, and had a sporadic fever that made him irritable and lethargic. Kris didn’t say anything, but, from the paleness of her cheeks and the dark circles under her eyes, I knew she wasn’t doing much better, and we were all worried about the signs of the Sickness’ progression. Zed did a little better than the kids because of the nanite augmentation, and his guns actually allowed him to be one of the more effective members of the team in a fight, but he was wearing down, too.

  Chanelle was still asleep from whatever the god had done to her. Or, more accurately, she was in a coma. I would have been more worried about her, but she showed no external signs of dehydration or any of the other dangers a normal coma patient dealt with.

  Without the ability to move on his own, Adam was pretty much permanently stationed at the base of the tree. We took turns going to him for tattoos. Despite his inability to use his Animus Skill himself, he could still give the limited ability to others through his Bestow Skill.

  We’d used large rocks to create a kind of wall around our camp and the Yggdrasil as a way to slow down the ground-bound enemies, and we kept a lookout in the upper branches of the tree to give us early warning of each wave. We’d also dug quite a few pits into the ground, but as the monsters grew smarter, they served more as a way to funnel our attackers toward a few specific points rather than effective traps. When we fought, we used our Seal of Nine Skills or physical combat, aided by ink weapons and shields Bestowed by Adam.

  Our problem was a lack of both stamina and supplies. The enemies were getting stronger, and we were growing more exhausted. Whether or not we could otherwise keep fighting forever, our food supplies would soon run out. In desperation, we pushed the Yggdrasil to grow faster. Even so, no matter how much power we gave it and how large its crystalline branches with the little veins of color and motes of light threaded through them grew, it could not survive on its own. At the top of the main twist of trunks, where they separated and spread their own directions, what looked like a fruit of some sort had started to grow. We hoped this meant it was getting close to self-sufficiency, but we didn’t know how much longer it would take, or even if the fruit actually had any significance.

  The god still sat unmoving at the top of his hill, his eyes closed and his legs crossed. We’d tried to get him to talk, but he ignored us completely until we gave up and returned our hopes to winning the Trial.

  Early one morning, a few hours before the red sun rose, I tossed myself down beside Adam, who was giving Jacky a series of tattoos across her hands. Without her Gravitational Autonomy Skill, she couldn’t toss her body around like a superhero, but she still had her fighting Skills, and adding ink blades or spikes to her attacks made her impressively lethal.

  Torliam was still the strongest of us by far. The number of Seed organisms strengthening his body meant he barely needed to sleep in times of pressure, and he could blur across the battlefield like time had slowed around him, each step cratering into the ground and each blow killing an enemy. As if to rub salt in the rest of our wounds, he lamented about how weak he was still, after NIX’s extended torture and siphoning off his Seeds.

  “I wonder if we can eat the monsters, if we get to them before they melt into the ground,” I said.

  Adam stared at me like I was an idiot. “They glow, Eve. And I’m pretty sure they’re not made of real flesh and blood, or Kris would be able to sense their corpses as possible containers with Summon. I’m not eating that.”

  Jacky looked over her shoulder to the side of the hill, which still displayed the requirements of the Trial, specifically, the clause that said we could give up at any time and go back to Earth. “Think he’s trying to starve us out?”

  Adam finished with her and moved on to me.

  I didn’t shrug, since he was sinking ink into my neck and shoulders. “He’s definitely trying to get us to give up. I mean, even the win scenario is unappealing. But if I was going to just give up, I wouldn’t have made it here in the first place.”

  “None of us would have,” Adam said softly, frowning as he worked on the details of an ink image.

  Jacky glared up at the god. “Why doesn’t he talk? Even if he doesn’t know English, all the other gods were able to learn it just from having us in their Trials, no?”

  Adam rolled his eyes. “Torliam says the god gave up his voice for power, or something. It’s bullshit, if you ask me. He’s just addicted to control and wants to make things as difficult as possible for us.”

  I grunted. Unfortunately, that sounded much more plausible, from what I’d seen of the god so far.

  Despite my exhaustion, I had nightmares and a difficult time falling asleep, because I was afraid those nightmares would turn into another too-real dream with the person who wore my body. When I was awake, I found myself thinking of her words. “I want this,” I murmured. “I won’t give up.”

  As if in response to my words, Zed yelled from his spot in the transparent branches at the top of the tree, “Wave incoming!”

  Chapter 30

  Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.

  — Nathaniel Hawthorne

  I only waited long enough for Adam to complete the little tattoo he was working on before hopping up and running to the stone wall.

  Skittering toward us from the plains were hundreds of monsters that looked like human women whose legs had been replaced by the latter end of a giant centipede. The segmented bug shell extended onto their human parts, and two sets of glowing red eyes sat above their sideways-opening mandibles. They had one set of human arms that held weapons, and two more sets of bug arms tipped with serrated claws that dripped goo that, I assumed from Murphy’s Law, was poisonous.

  They screamed as they skittered toward us, a sound that rang in my ears like nails on a chalkboard and didn’t seem to require them to stop for air.

  Zed took out his guns, said, “Animus,” and loaded up. He had long ago run out of bullets, but Adam had created ink replacements and anchored them in Zed’s skin. They didn’t fly with the force of real gunpowder since Adam had used some sort of pressurized air mechanism from a sea creature for propulsion instead, but they exploded on impact and could still do a fair amount of damage. He started shooting long before the monsters reached us, but they scattered and dodged like the bugs they resembled, and he only managed to kill a few of the incoming swarm.

  As they grew closer, their screams grew louder. I pressed my palm to the side of my head and winced. The scream wasn’t just an intimidation tactic. It was some sort of attack.

  Torliam Animated one of his own sets of tattoos, having set aside his pride and admitted that Adam’s Skill was indeed useful. A dozen ink spears burst out of the Estreyan’s chest. He aimed carefully and shot one off.

  A couple hundred meters away, one of the centipede women went quiet as chunks of flesh sprayed outward from the force of the spear ripping through her body.

  With a scream of defiance, Jacky’s body grew, and when she reached Torliam’s size, she released her own set of ink spears and started to attack. Unlike Torliam, her aim wasn’t unerring, and when she did hit, the monsters didn’t always die, but she was the only other one of us who could hope to be effective with a spear at that range.

  I stood up on top of the wall and spread my arms out, trying to look as imposing as possible, because that seemed to help. “You run toward your doom!” I yelled dramatically. Voice propelled my words and gave them a weight that my cartoon-villain dialogue shouldn’t have carried. I could feel the power of my voice in the air around me,
a kind of buzz that I’d experienced in front of the more powerful Estreyans, and which I believed was associated with high Charisma levels. “Fear us, for we are the demons that dwell in the night, the whisper behind your back, and the emptiness in Death’s eyes.”

  The monsters faltered, some of them slowing, a few even retreating, but, despite Voice’s improvement after constant use, it still wasn’t enough to stop their attack entirely. The creatures regained their momentum quickly, and their constant scream only grew louder.

  “We’re gonna need everybody for this one!” I yelled over my shoulder.

  Kris and Gregor, who’d run to stand by Adam at the sound of the alarm, acknowledged me with quick hand motions and started climbing the tree.

  When the centipede-women arrived at the wall, some of them rushed forward, scrambling over the deliberately lower points in the ramshackle defense. Others stayed back. Those ones were the screamers, or the ones with long-range abilities. More of them were still coming, as if appearing out of nowhere, and sprinting in from the horizon.

  “Animus,” I whispered. A sword popped out of the palm of my right hand, and a small shield grew around my left forearm. I threw myself directly into the fray, the incredibly thin ink of my sword cutting through carapace and flesh like I was hacking at a summer-ripe melon. It put a lot of strain on the weapon, but I had twenty more like it waiting right under the surface of my skin.

  I took a blow with my shield, then pirouetted to avoid an attack from my flank. When I meant to steady myself, the scream grating against the walls of my skull intensified, and I stumbled.

  Three of the nearest monster-women hurled themselves at me, but I dropped to one knee and activated one of the shields around my wrist.