by Scott Seier
"Yeah, he dropped me a full level before you made him break contact. That's half the reason I'm traveling with you instead of going off on my own. If I ran into a group of those guys without some back up, if they got the jump on me that is, I would be completely helpless." She looked up from her extensive examination of the creature, apparently satisfied that she had taken every secret that she could from the thing, and smiled at me. "I'm actually paying you a standard high level mercenary salary for a single day. One hundred gold to see me safely to town. Body guard to the head of the Eleventh Division. It's a prestigious position I assure you." She laughed at my expression. "Me guarding you is like a chipmunk guarding a dragon, but you won't hear me arguing. Gold is gold." She nodded in agreement. "Plus the company isn't all bad. I haven't gotten the chance to chat with a cascader yet. I've been biding my time to ask about what the hell happened, but I guess now is as good a time as any, right?" She said as she dusted off her gear, this, being the first time I actually noticed it. It was made of cloth, but had strands of dull metal woven into the fabric. The shirt was tight fitting with padded forearms and buckles that ran across her abdomen. Other than the weird metal it looked sort of ordinary. Not what I expected from a guild leader. Her pants were more of a loose fit, and once again seemed rather mundane. Huh.
As she walked past me, moving in the same direction we had been heading before, already peppering me with random questions about the cascade, I thought back to the terminal for the first time in a while. It had to have been at least three seconds! Or maybe I had made it four this time? But the main point was the words that that cloak had spat at me before I killed him. "Stay Safe." I shuddered. No way that was a coincidence. No way. Speeding up to catch the still chattering girl I made a deal with myself to take out any cloak that crossed my path. Just in case I was right about who they were.
Thirty minutes of walking through the woods got us to the road we had been aiming for, then taking it all the way around the base of the mountain, we spent another three hours traveling until, finally, Four Flags came into view. Its many torches and lamps cheerily twinkling in the distance. We exhausted the topic of the cascade pretty quickly, me being more than ready to forget everything about it and Milenta being nice enough to notice and let it go. Although finding out that she had already been logged into Acrion when it happened and had absolutely no warning when new players started appearing everywhere was certainly interesting. Her life had barely changed. She already had spent almost ninety hours a week logged in. Now this place was just more officially her home.
She babbled about her obsession with the creatures that inhabited Acrion for a good chunk of time then. I never had to fake interest at least. I learned enough from the girl to write a relatively well informed paper on half the creatures in the region. By the time we actually walked up to the town gate the moon was starting to dip in the sky and I was regaling Milenta with a story about how I had once been trapped in an outhouse by a curious bear when I was fourteen. She was laughing half hysterically, barely believing that outhouses still existed, let alone had people still using them. I assured her that at my great aunt's house in the country, there was indeed a functional outhouse. When I told her that my tipsy uncle had then walked out of the house, right past the bear, never even noticing it, and banged on the door, loudly demanding that I hurry up, scaring away the animal and saving me in the process, she was bent over with tears in her eyes. City girls man.
"What is with all the racket!" A man called down to us from the top of the wall. The wall itself was a wooden affair, mostly vertically lined logs, measuring about ten feet tall, but nearly ten feet thick as well. There was a walkway carved into the top of it that would allow a squad of guards, five wide, to march around easily up there. Now there was just one guy though. The gate guard that I had been warned I would need to bribe to get into the town after dark. He looked like he'd been sleeping. I opened my mouth to respond to his question when Milenta, still giggling slightly, held up her hand to stop me and stepped forward instead.
"Milenta, guild commander of the Eleventh Division. I have diplomatic clearance for entry into any town or city in the kingdom, yours included, open up." She said it lightly, but the guard almost fell over himself to obey her order. If I wasn't mistaken I heard the sound of a man wearing chainmail sliding down a flight of stairs on the other side of the wall a few seconds before the gate opened up for us. The mans face appearing and welcoming us to the town, red faced and panting. It was my turn to laugh my butt off. Luckily the npc didn't notice my rudeness or else I would have probably gotten hit with a reputation penalty with the town guard.
We made it to the Blue Banner in no time and said our goodbyes, each of us heading to our own rooms in the same establishment. She said that she was going to be spending the day with Hael tomorrow, and that the group wouldn't be going out to level because of that. She seemed apologetic, but I was more curious about the status of the rogue and guild leaders relationship than upset I was going to miss a day of leveling because of them.
Opening the door to my room I was met with a sense of relief. I'd only slept here one time, and the wake-up had been rather unpleasant, but looking at the plain room and lumpy bed, I couldn't help but feel safe for the first time in...god I didn't even know how many days it had been. I was just happy that I had set up a tab with the Banner before leaving.
I fell onto the bed and immediately felt a massive weight of exhaustion press down on me. Funny. I hadn't noticed that particular debuff growing the whole time I had been hiking, fighting and walking with Milenta. Apparently I'd pushed the limits of my virtual body and hadn't even known it. No wonder I kept getting stamina points when I leveled. I closed my eyes and relaxed my body, focusing on every muscle one by one until I started to drift off. Vigil set himself on my nightstand and formed into a pyramid.
I woke up exactly eight hours later feeling...perfect. My mind was clear! Thinking back on the events of the last few days everything felt blurry in my mind. I glanced at the nightstand looking for Vigil, but saw nothing except the annoying candle that had scared me so badly my first night in Acrion. Looking around I scanned the room, worrying that Vigil had somehow been un-summoned or something while I slept. Instead of anything like that I found him in a conical form, hanging from the ceiling in a corner like a bat...a bat...that's interesting.
We went down stairs, Vigil wrapped discreetly around my forearm, only to find that breakfast had stopped being served already. I suppressed the urge to kick a bar st
ool, but took it as a chance to explore some other food options in the town. Leaving, I wandered around for a good while, exploring the market street again, but refusing to go into any store just yet. I had a full gold in my bags, and some extra coin, from raiding the Arachkidar storeroom, but I was determined to make sure that I used it wisely.
I found a cart that sold food from it near the temples and bought a hand pie for 5 coppers. I realized then that it took ten coppers to make a silver, not the one hundred that I had assumed. It made sense in the grand scheme of things, one hundred silver to make a gold, but it would be a pain to lug around hundreds of coppers to put a silver together, wouldn't it? Still, the man that was manning the cart looked at me like I was a fool when he asked me for half a silver and I started looking for fifty coppers. Didn't stop me from eating the pie and enjoying the hell out of it. Acrion really did a damn good job with immersion. The food was warm and delicious, the sights, sounds, and smells were all perfect. There really could have been worse places to get stuck in.
After an hour of exploring, and eating until I received a 'well fed' buff, I decided to pay Kara a visit. If I remembered correctly I had been missing out on a specialization for way too long. Milenta had mentioned it a few times, but I hadn't put much thought into it because I was so far from town at the time. I was really hoping that it was impossible to train a specialty through the locket of desire or else I had a bone to pick with my instructor. She had taught me a few cool spells, sure, but still. I would have loved to get a specialty then and there. Maybe I gave up the chance of her teaching me a specialty then and there by demanding that summon: construct spell?
Thinking back on it I frowned slightly. An AI had definitely been poking around in that conversation. Maybe more covertly than with Saoirse, but there had been an altering of events to be sure.
The fact that I got my construct spell out of it, which Milenta had even said was operating well above where it should be, was too much of a coincidence to ignore. I couldn't help but think that I was somehow manipulated into making the decisions that I made. Although those choices had certainly made me stronger, so whoever was pulling string wanted me to be a bad ass? Sounded sketchy, but it also seemed to be benefiting me...
Thinking back to it, I had single handedly taken out that lumbering Dark minion thing. The memory of it felt oddly dull like I'd experienced it under water or something, but it had definitely happened. If Milenta had helped me, even a little bit, the experience that I received from it's death would have been a fraction of what it was. I wondered what bonuses a specialty would give me if I was already able to take out beasts like that without one...I knew that Billy had seemed like an absolute wrecking ball compared to the rest of us when she had shown up with hers. And that group of outlaws all had theirs and had sent us running for the hills just at the thought of them hunting us. I was starting to get excited.
I left the front gate. Receiving no warning that I needed a party to survive this time. The guard, yet another one that I hadn't seen before, just nodding respectfully. I jogged around the curved wall and towards the grove that Kara called home. Or at least I had never seen her anywhere else, so I assumed it was her home...
I marveled at how, now that I didn't have a ever-growing stack of exhaustion on me, my stamina regenerated much faster than I had ever experienced before. I'd been functioning with a debuff to it for so long, even the normal unhindered levels felt like a cheat code. It took no time at all for the small patch of woods to come into view, and I didn't even trip that much when I wove my way through the natural barrier. That one point of agility sure worked wonders.
Entering the clearing for the third time, I was practically vibrating with anticipation. This was the training wheels being taken off. A specialty is what would keep the next couple hundred levels from being a boring grind fest. They took the mundane early spell system and expanded them into complex and in-depth systems of progression. I was more than ready!
But... when I looked around, I found no eager Kara waiting for me like I expected. Instead all there was, was a parchment nailed to a nearby tree.
'Just call out my name and I should return within about an hour. Sorry for the inconvenience. Don't touch the ritual!' well then... I immediately went and poked the ritual, just out of principle. Then. "Kara?" I called, looking up into the pretty interwoven canopy that acted as a sort of roof for the glade. Then I plopped down, hoping that what I had done was sufficient to get her to come back. No reason to waste time while I wait.
I sent Vigil off to fly around as he pleased, with the direction to please help if someone attacked me while I was distracted, and then moved my consciousness into the tiny pocket realm that was now bound to me. Its existences fairly burst into to the focus of my mind. It was very different from the long minutes it had taken to find it the first time, with Saoirse looking at me like I was mentally deficient in some way.
A herald that couldn't find his own realm? A laugh for the ages. I submerged myself in the tiny sea of secluded space and examined the familiar area. There was no damage left from my first experiment with mana introduction, I had seen to that before doing anything else. The feeling of my realm being damaged had just been...wrong, somehow. There was still some residual energy from the event that existed in here, but it was beyond my ability to harness it. It just wasn't mine anymore, twisting and turning lazily around the place like it was.
I looked at the dark boundaries of the realm thoughtfully. Saoirse had said it would take years to force it to expand into a state that it could support raw mana, but then, after that, it would be smooth sailing. I would just have to infuse mana into the realm to expand it after the first hurdle, the basic resources doing the work for me, no problem! There was no way it would actually take years...this was a game after all, right? I briefly thought back to the AI telling me that he was making the tier system just for me, and had the dark thought that maybe he really did design it to take that long. He seemed to be under the impression that the cascade was permanent, so why wouldn't he design mechanics to occupy that much time? I shoved those thoughts to the side and buried them. No way.
I drove my mental influence into the fabric that isolated my realm from normal reality. I felt the hundreds of layers of material and then, focusing on what I would need to effect change, I went deeper. To the fibers and threads that made up the layers. It was...hopeless. There were thousands of fibers in just a tiny section of only one layer of this stuff...
As an experiment I mentally grabbed as many fibers as I could and willed them to expand. To grow and stretch. It was like trying to push over a brick wall when there was a reinforced steel wall right behind it. It didn't even budge. Years may have actually been underselling how long this would take. I pulled my consciousness from the boundary and free floated in the void. Looking around, I couldn't help but feel a little down about how this empty place apparently represented my power as a herald. Even though right about now it did represent it perfectly. Absolutely nil. Maybe less.
Jerking upright, I spun in place. Wait a second! If one mana was enough to blow this whole place to hell, what would half of one mana do? I focused for a second to bring up my character information and then brought up my skill list.
Spells
Abilities
Skills
Summon: Veil Imp
Soul Focus
Binding Art
Veil Siphon
Micro Casting
Astral Tag
Fade Seal
Summoning: Falling Gate
Summoning: Construct
Micro Casting
Allows to caster to restrict the effects of spells to a much more precise level than the average caster
This skill also allows the caster to produce perfectly scaled down versions of known spells
The scale in which a spell can be reduced is dependent on the casters will
If I was able to cast my construct spell on something as tiny as a grain of sand, be it made of
iron or not, using this skill, then I should have no problem reducing a point of mana into a smaller form, right? Without waiting to think if It was a good idea, I closed my eyes and focused hard.
I held the thought of what I needed within myself. Less than one mana. I just needed half. Or actually, after a moment of indecision, how about one tenth of one mana? It took time, but I had no rush. When I was focused on this realm my mind seemed to perceive time differently. Before I had repaired a considerable amount of damage, taking what felt like hours, but when I had opened my eyes Saoirse acted like it had only been a short time. Granted, npcs are designed to ignore longer than average pauses, but still, it was something.
After a while of trying and failing, rushing to reabsorb mana before it was able to collide with my realm more than once, something clicked. It felt like I suddenly just could see smaller. I know that sounds weird, but before I was looking at my mana pool as ten chunks of singular energy things, but now I saw each of those points as ten tiny segments of their own wholes. I'd been looking for ten percent and suddenly could see them in ten percent segments, so that kind of had to mean it worked right?
Mentally reaching for the new unit of mana, I would have to come up for a name for it, I drew it out of the whole, the space it left behind being almost instantly replaced by my passive regeneration. For thirty seconds I held the tiny spark of relatively insignificant power like it was the answer to world hunger. Then, tensing up and praying that this wouldn't end the same way it did the last time, I dropped it. Right in the center of the realm. The result was blinding, but not painful. That, for one, was a good sign. The spark exploded, just like the mana had before, the second my influence left it, but then it collapsed in on itself. The boundaries of my realm flexed and swayed, but didn't rip or tear.