Spectres & Skin: Exodus

by RJ Creed

  Atk: 7 (+14) (-4 Dual-Wielding) — Def: 5 (+26)

  Alliances:

  Dawnspire Collective — Very Friendly

  Top Skills:

  Snickersnee (Level 5 — 0%)

  Speech (Level 4 — 90%)

  Dodge (Level 3 — 30%)

  Stealth (Level 2 — 15%) (+3)

  Deception (Level 2 — 25%)

  Abilities:

  Draw Strike (Level 1)

  Triple Strike (Level 1)

  Disarm (Level 1)

  My eyelids cracked open just as the sun broke over the horizon, and the grass and the trees around us were soaked in its orange light. The orange glow reminded me of something, and I concentrated hard for a moment.

  A second glow, stronger than it ever had been before, cropped up just beside the rising sun, and I blinked into it, then looked away. We were close. Closer to Xanthe, and close to whatever treasure or trap was in store for us where we were going.

  Feeling renewed and refreshed, even though I had only had five or six hours of sleep — in this world, I seemed to just be steadily more refreshed for every hour of rest I had, instead of waking up feeling more tired and awful than I had when I’d gone to bed — I sat fully up and locked eyes with Moro, who was curled up, staring at me from behind her own tail.

  “Morning,” I said softly, and quickly found myself drawn to my last piece of quartz, in my pack. Before I really knew what I was about to do, it was in my hand. Cool and unpowered.

  I rolled the stone around between my fingers and this piqued the spectre’s interest, so she got up and stepped towards me, settling into a comfortable sit and tilting her head, waiting.

  “You looking forward to more?” I asked. Her eyes flicked to mine and then instantly back to the stone. She licked her lips and shifted from foot to foot. Well, now I couldn’t disappoint her.

  I wanted to think of something specific to an upcoming fight with a band of mercenaries — or ex-mercenaries; I wasn’t sure if they were still fighting for pay after Incendia took over and made it culty — but I was drawing a blank. As this was my last stone, I couldn’t do anything that was under the wrong constellation, or Moro wouldn’t be able to consume it. So no fire, no water, no earth, no air…

  Votorius-Khan. The warrior.

  She could unlock, and she could bite. She could savage, really. So … she could move the mechanism inside locks. She could tear flesh. The Falchion would probably have armour, and swords. Perhaps even falchion swords…

  I closed my eyes, and held the quartz tight. I pictured a sword, and just to be safe, I tried to picture Moro in the background, so that the quartz might be more inclined to help me create a spell that she could actually use. The sword rotated slowly in my imagination, with HD detail and clarity. It had a red-wrapped hilt and a sharp, clean blade. In my imagination, Moro howled. Suddenly the sword was gripped by a large shadowy figure, as if it had been all along. I was about to imagine the sword flying out of its hand, but I stopped myself forcefully — I could already use Disarm with my Hand-to-Hand skill. Instead, the sword twitched upwards. Then it twitched again, and then the brute let out a dusty grunt that echoed through my mind, and drove its own sword into its smokey form. The figure dispersed, and the sword clattered to the ‘ground’. Moro howled silently again, and my eyes snapped wide open.

  The quartz was burning hot and I resisted the urge to whimper and throw it to the ground, instead opening my palm and shakily offering it to the ghost.

  She licked her chops, her golden eyes wide, and gripped it with her front two teeth, flinging it into the back of her throat and swallowing greedily. I let myself smile down at her, and the stone soon fell from her spectral stomach, devoid of magical energy. A steaming blackened rock nestled between blades of grass.

  “Tasty?” I asked her. She levelled her intense gaze at me, and I resisted the urge to try, and fail, to scratch her behind the ears. “Glad you liked it.”

  Moro has learned a new spell!

  Lesser Domination

  Congratulations! Spectral Magic has reached Level 1!

  You have gained 10 EXP.

  All my spells were still ‘Lesser’, without fail. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to be doing something different to make my spells stronger, or if they could potentially get stronger later on down the line. But the fact that all her spells looked like that wasn’t doing wonders for my confidence.

  Lesser Unlock, Lesser Bite, Lesser Domination.

  It seemed to me that, in a fight against somebody with a weapon, the latter was going to be the most useful, especially if their weapon happened to be good. It’d really be able to help turn the tables in a tough battle. It was also probably something that could be cast in the shadows to really psych my enemies out. Altogether, I was proud of myself for finding it.

  “Let’s see what it does,” I said. “Use Lesser Domination on my sword.” I leaned my sword, unsheathed, against a nearby fallen branch. “Can you make it slash at this branch?”

  Moro arched back her head and a silent howl left her lips. I felt a strange twinge shudder through my body, but nothing happened to the sword.

  Attention! You don’t have enough mana to cast Lesser Domination.

  I looked up at my blue mana bar, which blinked madly at me for a second or two. I blinked back at it. “But it’s full?” I asked the air. Moro let out a disappointed huff and lay down on the grass again. “Shit.”

  I concentrated hard on my mana and to my delight a prompt appeared that told me what I’d thought: the linked attribute was Intelligence. I would need to increase that in order to increase my mana pool. And I wanted to be able to use my useful new spell in the dungeon. Something that took more than my entire pool of Level 6 mana was sure to be a strong, helpful move.

  Spectral Magic was a skill that increased my linked attribute — Intelligence — every two levels, instead of every five, right? So I could meditate on new spells to increase that skill to level 2. But I had run out of spectral stones.

  Shit.

  I’d have to wait until we encountered an enemy — I considered going out and looking for trouble right then but that would be far too foolish just before entering a dangerous cave — and then I’d have to order Moro to do a fair amount of my attacking for me. If she kept using spells, my Spectral Magic score would increase. Hopefully by the time we encountered the Falchion, it would be at a higher level, and my Intelligence would be high enough for me to cast Domination. They’d never know what hit them! I allowed myself to imagine it. The second-in-command in the Silver Falchion, the one who was the most loyal to the idea of having their god rule the world, cockily flashing his cursed sword around and then — bam! — Maledictus twists in his hand and guts him out of nowhere.

  That’d be great.

  “What are you grinning about?”

  I twisted my body in shock to see that Roark was leaning on a tree, mostly obscured by leaves and shadow, to my right. “How long have you been there?”

  “The last two hours. Keeping watch.”

  I turned back to his roll mat and could have sworn I still saw a figure lying there, my brows creased in confusion. I had completely forgotten about the whole keeping watch thing.

  “It’s alright, we figured you’d need more sleep. Just in case the whole chosen one thing needs to come in handy. Don’t want you nodding off at a crucial moment.”

  It occurred to me that there had been barely any moments so far where I had been treated better for having been chosen by Titania, so I guess it was nice that he had let me sleep. It was important to him, then, that I was at the top of my game. He didn’t want me to die and leave Dawnspire in the hands of No One.

  I realised then just how much I had to try today. Not just for me, and for my own life, but for the rest of the city I’d lived in for the last week.

  I owed them my best, at least.

  “I’d never seen a spectre learn a spell, by the way,” Roark added. “It was pretty interesting, but not as flashy
as I’d expected it to be.”

  “Yeah,” I said, not sure what else I was supposed to say. He wandered over and sat on the grass beside me, picked up a hunk of wood and drew his dagger, and began to idly whittle. I watched, fascinated by the process.

  “You’re brave for going through with this,” he said, casually, as if he was talking about public speaking or going for a job interview out of my league. Slivers of bark and then pale wood peeled from the chunk of branch. I looked around, and then grabbed a nearby fallen branch about double the length, and stomped on it to snap it in half. I sat back down beside him and pulled out my older dagger — which was probably now my non-combat knife for peeling food and carving wood — and began to carve the bark from the wood as well.

  We sat in silence as the sun rose for many more minutes, peeling wood away from wood, until Roark spoke again.

  “This girl. She someone you’ve known a long time?”

  “No. Just a day. But she came from the same place as me, and she had similar goals to me. We were going to stick together for a while longer, but she was just … taken. She was gone.” I shrugged. I didn’t expect anyone to understand; especially not anyone from Pax.

  But he nodded. He had a calming aura about him that I appreciated. “I understand,” he said. “We’ll do our best. We’re close; we’ll get there before lunch if we walk quickly and avoid any trouble.”

  “Avoid trouble? That’s not our forte,” I pointed out.

  Roark let out a polite laugh. “We’ll do our best,” he said again.

  My best.

  What did that even entail? I had been a screwup — a lazy, cynical prick — back home. And here I had my legs back and my personality had barely changed. I still did the bare minimum. I still destroyed every relationship I entered into. I had nothing left to blame, but me.

  What would my best look like? I had never even met it.

  I continued to whittle until Ryken woke up. The thrumming sensation of levelling up in the skill did little to cheer me up as I packed up my mat and my scraps of food and water skin, and we continued to trudge straight towards the sun.

  “Pinehaven Redoubt,” Roark said as the three of us stood in front of the mouth of a cave, set into a rocky face. “If my research was right, this place was intended to be a fortification for the invading Wistlanders, many many years ago. They tried to take the south, but the south fought with everything it had.” Roark smirked. “The mistake the northerners made was believing that simply outnumbering us was enough to take us down.”

  Ryken turned to him with interest. “They outnumbered us in the war?”

  “Yes, almost two to one. But that wasn’t enough. Because they had nothing to lose. You know what we stood to lose?” He paused, but neither of us replied. “Our land. Our families at home. Our pride. Our legacy. That was their mistake. Never push a man into a corner where he stands to lose everything, and then some.”

  I stared into the darkness of the cave ahead, and said nothing.

  Grab No One’s secret treasure from the bowels of a hidden cave. Fight whatever lurked inside to defend it. Plus whatever had moved in since. Fight a band of trained mercenaries, plus potentially a devout cultist who existed to end my life. Defeat him, though he wielded a weapon custom-made to destroy me. Rescue a woman I barely knew. Help a band of cultists and oppressors keep their hold on Dawnspire, even though my only goal was to take them down, eventually.

  Easy, right? I just needed to do my best.

  “Fuck it,” I muttered, and stepped across the threshold. Moro, at my heels, just about glowed enough to light the way. “C’mon.” I waved the two others through, and they followed. At least I had a party. I wasn’t doing this alone. With them, maybe I stood a chance. Maybe I could succeed.

  The mouth of the cave stretched on into a dark pathway, the stone walls lined with mosses that glowed an alien blue in the light of the spectre. I trailed my left hand along the wall, figuring that it would be a good way to stay orientated somewhere so maze-like.

  “The map says it’s straight ahead quite some way. Probably through to the other end of this mountain,” Roark said. “There’s a large cavern here.” He pointed at it on the copy of the map. “Then a small room off of it, here. That’s where the treasure is supposed to be, and where a little picture of that statuette was. We’ll just hope that we’re the first ones here. Looks like we are.”

  We looked around at his words, and saw no sign that anybody was ready to leap out at us, so I shrugged. “Keep an eye out for traps anyway,” I said, pointlessly. “It’s possible that either the Falchion doesn’t trust us, or the people who originally sealed away No One’s treasure have left surprises for anyone who tried to get it.”

  Ryken nodded. “I think it’s safe to assume we got here first. Let’s get through it as quickly as we can, though.”

  “We can’t waste any time. Whatever the treasure is, it’s important to Incendia. And that witch doesn’t need any help with anything she deems important enough to do,” Roark said.

  “Well, we need to be prepared for a boss battle,” I said without really thinking as we made our way down the tunnel. They both shot me a funny look.

  “A what? Whose boss?”

  “Oh. Well, you see that cavern? The big one? The treasure is off to the side. The big cavern will probably have a big bad monster in it, defending the treasure.”

  “You think the Titania worshipers who hid the treasure will have trapped a monster down here as well?” Roark asked. “Why do you think that?”

  I thought for a moment as we headed down and twisted to the right. “I guess … it’s just a hunch. I mean, nothing good ever comes easily, does it?”

  They seemed to accept my vague cynical excuse, and Roark shrugged as we came to an archway. It was like somebody had carved a doorway but never added the door.

  “Wait,” I said, holding out my arms to pause them. “There might be traps.”

  “You sense them?” Roark asked.

  “We’re just … entering a dungeon for the first time. There might be something to alert enemies or keep out wandering animals, at least.”

  “A dungeon?” Ryken repeated. I ignored them, and crouched instead.

  To my surprise, a thin thread was running across the archway, about three inches above the dusty ground. If we had walked through, something bad would have happened, no doubt. “Here,” I said, but then flashing text distracted me from continuing.

  You have discovered a hidden skill!

  Perception: One man has the best sword in the land, and no sense. Another has just a rusty spear and perceives all. The second man wins every fight.

  Related Attribute: WIS

  Had the game stopped berating me for everything? It seemed like it didn’t have any issue with me picking up that skill. Was I actually progressing? Was I not disappointing anybody? How great was that?

  “There’s a trap here,” I said triumphantly, standing and folding my arms with a smug smirk. “So make sure to step over it.”

  “I can see it,” Roark said politely, and stepped over it and into the room.

  “Yeah, thanks for finally getting out of the way, fuckwad,” Ryken added, and stepped over it too, into the first room.

  I took a second before I entered along with them to inspect them, because I realised I had no idea what levels they were both at at that point. It turned out that Ryken had at some point hit Level 7, which had him still above me, but I was catching up fast. Roark was ten ahead at Level 17. I was pretty sure that I was going to be doing a fair amount of hiding from things while he did the work, if my theory was correct about this being a dungeon — and therefore soon to be littered with foes. I was incredibly relieved to see that he was a significantly higher level than we were.

  I stepped over the trap carefully, and into the first room of the dungeon. It was small. About as big as my tiny bedroom in my apartment back home… back on Earth, I should say. Not home anymore.

  Inside the room was a
stone altar. I only guessed that it was an altar because above the large stone table was a statue of a lithe, twisted, smiling beautiful woman. She was dressed in what looked like wet, clinging cloth, perfectly chiseled into stone so that it looked almost like it would feel damp, and move against her skin if you touched it. Except that it was a green-grey colour and covered in dark patches of furry moss. Her body was entwined in long vines covered in what looked like thorns, that reached up to her face and head, catching in her beautifully carved long hair. Her eyes were shut, her lips curved into a smile, as though she was writhing in pleasure at the sensation of thorns cutting through to her skin.

  At her feet stood a smaller figure, rougher carved; a strange contrast to how carefully constructed, and realistic, the woman herself was. It stood on four legs and I could see the remains of a crumbling tail and long, proud muzzle. I found it hard to tear my eyes away from the statue.

  “The Ivy Lady,” Roark mumbled, and I saw that he was reading aloud from a bunch of scratchy squiggles that I would never have been able to interpret.

  “That’s Titania?” I blurted, and Ryken gave me a side eye when he saw my flustered expression.

  “Chill out, dude, it’s a statue. Not a woman.”

  “Yeah, but … I didn’t think that she was going to be so … y’know,” I said, trying in vain to sound less like a weirdo.

  “Sexy?” Roark finished for me with a smirk.

  “She’s pretty sexy,” I agreed, but then shook my head. “Not, like, y’know, but … she’s just been portrayed as looking so sexual. Why would they have done that?” They both stayed silent, simply amused at my reaction. “It just seems like a weird choice, that’s all. I’m just wondering.” Silence. “I’m just curious!”

  “Let’s get on with this before Matt passes out,” Ryken said, and turned away from the statue, towards the only open path. There were three other light patches in the stone in arch shapes that looked totally like they were secret doors, but I thought that the others had had too much of my meta-thinking, so instead of saying it out loud I wandered around looking for something like a switch or a lever.