Spectres & Skin: Exodus

by RJ Creed

  “Matthew,” Roark prompted, impatient.

  “One second,” I said. There was a loose brick in the wall. I knew it! I pulled it out and … nothing happened. I peered inside the hole and then reached in with my hand and pulled out a small velvety sack. Inside it was a large shining stone, milky and swirling, and glowing.

  Spectral Opal

  Very Fine Quality

  That was all it had to say about that. Great, though; I had another potential spell that I could teach Moro, and—

  “Hurry up,” the other two hissed through gritted teeth. I clumsily shoved the stone into my pack and stepped towards them, but just as I did, I heard a rumbling that first sounded as though it was coming from very far away, and then sounded much closer … until it was in the tiny room with us. The floor shook briefly, and then the three light patches in the wall — I freaking knew they were secret doors — slid open and revealed three very angry, very rotted-looking people.

  “What the fuck?” I couldn’t help but yell out. “What are those?”

  Roark grunted as he unsheathed a shortsword and took a battle stance. “Guardians,” he said. “Stay on the defensive and don’t use every ace up your sleeve, boys — this is likely just the beginning.”

  It was good to have him here. Definitely. He would keep us calm, and he could keep us ordered.

  Don’t use every ace up your sleeve. It was sound advice. I glanced over at Moro. But to gain the ace up my sleeve, I needed to drain my mana pool. Again, and again, and again. If I had any hope of growing my Intelligence score, anyway.

  Shrine Guardian

  Level 5 Undead

  Hostile

  The three Guardians appeared to have split off to pick off each of us one on one. Ryken had leapt up onto the altar and was unsheathing his dagger to stab his Guardian’s flesh, and then cursing and slamming a boot into its rotting, shredded chest to keep it away for a couple more seconds. Roark remained in the archway leading to the next tunnel, and was expertly swordfighting with the dextrous undead who had chosen him.

  Mine lumbered at me, drawing a long, rusty sword, and I drew my own shortsword and held it steadily in front of me. In retrospect, I realised, I should have found someone to give me pointers with the thing. Maybe Dareth, before I sent death his way. Fuck, this stuff was hard.

  “Moro,” I commanded.

  The wolf was a blur as I raised my sword to block a crashing attack that sent me staggering back two paces. The zombie thing, with its mouth hanging open impossibly far and its receded eye sockets, was stronger than it probably had been in life, but it couldn’t withstand the power of my spectre. Moro clamped her jaws around its neck, her ghostly paws on its chest, and yanked away sinewy old flesh. The creature let out a dry clicking noise that perhaps could have once been a cry of pain, and its body wobbled but didn’t collapse.

  My mana slid down to just about 55%, and Moro dropped to the floor with grace and backed away again. I really wished that she had a smaller attack; one that didn’t drain me by half. Then I could really spam her while I did some swordfighting — that would give me a crazy advantage over most enemies. As it was, though, she would remain an occasional boon.

  A boon that I still needed to strengthen up.

  The zombie recovered more swiftly than a living counterpart would have, and lurched towards me with his longsword swung in a great arc, aiming right for my core. I thought as fast as I knew how, and attempted a Disarm. I first leapt back as far as I could, so that the tip of the sword just slashed at my armour. I swore under my breath, not daring to take the time to look down and see the clean gouge in my new jerkin. When he was fumbling to recover from his near-miss I stepped in, grabbed his rotting, crumbling wrist, twisted and yanked. The Guardian screeched and I felt hot teeth sink into my shoulder. Through my shoulder guards I felt little of the pain, but the sensation was still visceral and panic-inducing.

  Disarm has failed!

  With a strangled noise I disengaged from our upright spooning position and whipped around to face him again, panting. I had still lost almost 10% of my Stamina — which was less than normal, and I attributed that to the +4 to Fortitude with my full leather set — and I was standing at roughly 85% HP, but I was doing alright.

  The monster opposite me was hissing and spitting, and its HP had dropped to 60% from our tussles and from Moro’s help. I had the great idea to feint with my sword arm and then use Draw Strike with Excision from my left hand, but my Dual-Wielding skill (or lack thereof; I had only discovered its existence, not gained a point in it) failed me. I dropped my dagger on the floor in my concentration effort and the Guardian clashed his sword against mine in retaliation.

  “You guys alive?” I heard Roark’s voice from across the room.

  “Y-yeah,” Ryken growled.

  As much as I didn’t wish death on my own party, I was inwardly glad that they were struggling too. I would have felt like a jackass if I was the only one still fighting.

  “Still alive,” I confirmed, holding strong against his powerful arm. My own arm began to tremble sooner than I would have liked, though, so I nodded to Moro again. Happily, she seemed to sense what I wanted from her almost instantaneously. She lunged forward, lip curled back and teeth bared, and tore out a chunk of flesh right above where the monster’s heart would originally have beaten. Looked like I didn’t need to say aloud what I wanted her to do, which was definitely a handy fact to learn.

  This time it took the Guardian a couple of seconds longer to fully recover. The wound was gaping; dried and rotted skin flapping. Its HP was down to 30% and I didn’t waste any time. I left the dagger on the floor and stepped forward, pivoting all of my weight into a heavy swing with my shortsword. It hacked into the ribcage and I felt it scrape against old bone — a sensation that I could feel uncomfortably in my teeth.

  I couldn’t yank it out with just my strength alone, so I had to punch the bone just beside the puncture, and I felt the old ribs snap under my fist. I resisted the urge to gag as its chest cavity caved in and the monster stepped back, and then fell to the floor, dazed and moving its jaw up and down as if biting desperately at the air. I strode to its head and drove my sword deep into its skull.

  Congratulations! Swords has reached Level 1!

  You have defeated Shrine Guardian (Level 5)

  You have gained 65 EXP!

  I wiped my brow and stepped back, ducking suddenly to avoid the wide arc of Roark’s longsword as he hacked at the wheezing head of his own Guardian foe. Ryken, seeing what I had done, drove his dagger into the eye of his felled enemy just in case it decided to stand up and fight again.

  We all stood and caught our breath, replenishing our stamina in silence. After a moment I took a drink from my water skin and checked my HP again. It was climbing up slowly but surely. By the time we reached the next tunnel I was sure I’d be back up to 90%, and I was happy with that. After all — these enemies wouldn’t have appeared if I hadn’t dislodged that brick. I was pretty sure they were set to enter the room if the trap thread was triggered, as well.

  “Sorry about that,” I said, when we were ready to head on. But I should have known better than to admit fault around current company.

  “Yeah, that was pretty fucking stupid,” Ryken spat, right on cue. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

  “Hey,” Roark said gently, and just that one simple word seemed to have a calming effect on him — and me, as well. He sounded so level-headed all the time. “He was just looking around. What did you find, Matthew?”

  “I, uh,” I said, fishing the opal out from my bag and showing it. They both stared at it with their eyes flicking left to right for a moment, and then looked back up at me. “It’s for spectral magic use. So it’s useful for me.”

  “Well, this is a shrine for Titania, so it makes sense that they’d be everywhere,” Roark said. “Let’s go. Everyone doing alright? We should party up from here on out so we can keep an eye on each other’s vitals.”

  “S
ure,” I said, and Roark linked up with Ryken, and then turned to me, but quickly shook his head.

  “You’re already partied up. I can’t.”

  “Can’t you just add the two of us to this party? What if I try to add you?” I concentrated briefly.

  You cannot link with this person because you are both already in a party.

  “The leader of your party would have to add the two of us,” Roark said. “I’m guessing she is the party leader.”

  I sighed. “Yes.” I didn’t want to delete my link with Xanthe, because it showed me where she was. I chewed my lip as I thought about it, and then became very aware of how much time I was wasting.

  “Let’s get moving,” Ryken muttered. “You’ll have to stay unlinked to us until you can figure stuff out.” He sounded, as always, like I was just slowing them down. Which this time I totally was, so I couldn’t say anything in response.

  Should I just risk losing my connection to Xanthe — my way of finding out where she was — so that I could keep an eye on the others? And, importantly, so that they could keep an eye on my stats as well. That would be able to help me out in a pinch.

  But if the enemies were really bringing Xanthe with them, me having the ability to spy where she was would be incredibly useful. I would have asked them what they thought I should do, if I didn’t think Ryken would tell me I was a fuckwad.

  As we descended further down the twisting tunnel I concentrated briefly on Xanthe’s name in the top of my vision. Her HP and other bars were still greyed out, which meant she wasn’t in my immediate vicinity — not in the same dungeon, definitely — and proved one of two things: the Falchion weren’t in here, or they lied and they hadn’t brought her.

  Obviously there was no way of knowing which it was. It would be better for me, I figured, for the others to be able to see my ‘vitals’ in battle, just in case I got into a sticky situation.

  “Sorry,” I muttered to no one, and gestured at Xanthe’s details, then severed the connection with a sweep of my fingers, just like in The Afterlife. A prompt asked me if I was sure, and I accepted, and our connection was deleted.

  I felt kind of guilty, but once Roark added me to his party, I felt better knowing that we could all keep a better eye on each other. I was the only one with a mana bar, I noted, which wasn’t too strange when I thought about it. Neither of them mentioned it.

  “On your guard,” Roark whispered just as we came to the opening to another cavern. “I hear movement.”

  “In the shadows,” Ryken said, and stepped backwards. I actually could barely see him anymore, and at first I figured it was because he was obscured by shadow and dark clothing, but there weren’t that many shadows in here. I realised that this must be one of his abilities — probably based around his Stealth skill — and that I should have asked him to teach me something like that before we’d turned up here; it would really have helped, undoubtedly, with whatever our final fight ended up being.

  I turned around to spot Roark but he stepped backwards on the other side and melted away as well. Fuck. I was just going to have to stroll right the fuck in, and I might as well have had a neon sign on my head that read ‘HI I’M MATTHEW’. I nodded into the cavern, signalling that they should enter first because I would blow it all if I did, and I spotted vague movement as they both slid into the cavern.

  I leaned around and peered inside the room, spotting Ryken’s figure on my right, slowly reaching for his sling and readying a large stone, but to my left I couldn’t see Roark at all — if this was an ability, he probably had a much higher level of it than Ryken did.

  It took me a second for my eyes to adjust to see into a room that Moro wasn’t lighting up with her glow, but when I did I shuddered at the sight. In the far corner there was some kind of a writhing ball of black and blue shining gemstones, or I thought so at first. Then one of the lumps broke apart and scuttled across the cavern. I caught sight of six scuttling legs and the familiar sheen of a beetle’s exoskeleton. They were black bugs, the size of a dog. And there had to have been dozens of them, all squirming and chattering around each other and occasionally clicking across the floor to find a better access point to the huddle.

  Whatever they were all occupied with, it was distracting them effectively from my approaching comrades. I felt a little dumb back here on my own. I had no Stealth abilities and no projectile weapons.

  When the two of them were in position, a large stone sailed from the shadows and connected to one of the beetles that had broken away from the group. Just then, what looked like a crossbow bolt snapped from an unseen string and whistled to collide with a second beetle. A second stone to the first beetle and it was down, flipping onto its back and curling its legs under. The crossbow bolt seemed to skewer the second beetle through the exoskeleton simultaneously, and the beetle oozed slime.

  You have defeated Black Beetle Runt (Level 3)

  You have gained 40 EXP!

  You have defeated Black Beetle Runt (Level 3)

  You have gained 40 EXP!

  That looked like a large amount of experience for simply standing in the entryway like a slack-jawed idiot. It looked like the game gave me around equal experience while I was partied up — which was a welcome discovery. No wonder Xanthe, knowing the mechanics, had wanted to join a team with someone stronger than her in order to cut some corners.

  The beetles had their full attention on the two of them now, and both Ryken and Roark mostly materialised from the shadows, advancing on the group and drawing their close-range weapons: the longsword and the stiletto.

  This was my cue. I drew my shortsword with my right hand and raised my left hand expectantly, knowing that I could draw Excision in a pinch to help myself out, but also aware that my Dual-Wielding skill was terrible right now, and that was probably why I had spotted a penalty to my attack on my character sheet earlier.

  To my right and my left, the other two slashed and hacked, teeth gritted. I advanced on one beetle scurrying full-throttle towards Ryken, who was already occupied with three beetles, so I thrust my sword forward and barely broke through its hard armour, but did enough to have it turn on me instead.

  The next time I shoved my blade forward I aimed in between the two wings, or segments of armour, and felt it give way much easier. The beetle hissed, chattered, and then rolled onto its back.

  Critical hit!

  You have defeated Black Beetle Runt (Level 3)

  You have gained 40 EXP!

  That hadn’t been too hard! Renewed confidence drove me into a sprint, and I commanded Moro to Bite a beetle clicking its way towards me, and at the same I hopped, pivoted, and smashed my blade down between the two armoured wings on another beetle. Moro ripped off most of the insect’s head beside me as the beetle my sword got stuck in hissed at me and lunged forward. It snapped its disgusting mandibles at my ankle, bringing me down from 90% health to 85% again.

  You have defeated Black Beetle Runt (Level 3)

  You have gained 40 EXP!

  With a noise of disgust I twisted from its grasp and thrust my sword through its head.

  You have defeated Black Beetle Runt (Level 3)

  You have gained 40 EXP!

  You have defeated Black Beetle Runt (Level 3)

  You have gained 40 EXP!

  It was happening too fast! The other two were destroying the beetles beside them left and right as well.

  You have defeated Black Beetle Runt (Level 3)

  You have gained 40 EXP!

  You have defeated Black Beetle Runt (Level 3)

  You have gained 40 EXP!

  I punted one near me far away, and it cracked against the wall and fell down, immediately launching into a run, as if it hadn’t even noticed.

  Ryken was panting, and I noticed that his HP was down to 70%, while Roark’s was still at 95%.

  You have defeated Black Beetle Runt (Level 3)

  You have gained 40 EXP!

  By the time I got to Ryken’s side I realised my mana was ju
st about up to half again. I gestured towards the one that Ryken had his boot resting on while he stabbed another one.

  You have defeated Black Beetle Runt (Level 3)

  You have gained 40 EXP!

  The wolf tore its disgusting head from its body, right under Ryken’s foot.

  You have defeated Black Beetle Runt (Level 3)

  You have gained 40 EXP!

  Congratulations! Spectral Magic has reached Level 2!

  You have gained a point in Intelligence.

  You have gained 20 EXP.

  I turned around to see that we had dispatched of all of them, quickly and without much effort. Ryken had been swarmed and needed to take a second to bandage his shins, but by the time he was done he was back up to 90%, about the same as I was at.

  My progress to the next level had shot up from that fight — this was really reinforcing my decision to group up with them, if that was the kind of experience boost I could get from a simple swarm fight. I had gone from 6% towards Level 7 to 87%.

  Something caught my eye as Roark searched a couple of beetle corpses, presumably for any part of it worth keeping — perhaps for his leatherwork or just for trade. Either way, pulling bits off of a dead beetle wasn’t something that I was into trying if I didn’t have to. I stepped over to the lumpy mass that the beetles had originally been crowding when we’d entered, and noticed that it had at one point — fairly recently — been a human being. The blood was still dark red and sticky. It could even have been someone who had entered right before us. The Falchion?

  I saw no clues as to which faction, if any, the person belonged to from the bloody torn clothing scraps, or anything else. Swallowing down my disgust, I knew what I had to do. I crouched and went through the person’s pockets, methodically.