Unbound Deathlord: Challenge

by Edward Castle

  Current level: 9

  HP, MP and stamina restored

  As soon as I closed the window I felt magic upwards and ahead of me. Upwards for the death spheres and ahead for the small illusion. It was pretty useless now, but I guess it would become better on higher levels.

  Scolding myself for not creating a new death sphere before leveling up, I took the time to create it and restore my MP.

  Then I pushed the button.

  Jack Thorn

  Unbound Deathlord

  Legendary Spotter, Dark Archmage

  Level 9

  Hit Points:235 / 235

  Mana Points:370 / 370

  Stamina:200 / 200

  Attributes:

  Strength:7

  Agility:7

  Dexterity:5

  Constitution:7

  Intelligence:10

  Perception:5 + 10 [Items]

  Willpower:9

  Charisma:5

  Traits:

  Adept Mage:11 + 10 [Items]

  Adept Controller:11

  Diviner:2

  Gold Digger:2

  Scavenger:2

  Antimage:1

  Crafter:1

  Energizer:1

  Healer:1

  Meditator:1

  Mind Seer:1

  Negotiator:1

  Nitpicker:1

  Shadow:1

  10. Everything Changed When the Fire Mage Attacked

  'Beg if you have to. But make sure to pay back whoever put you in this position.'

  - Mother

  A purple circle with a thirteen pointed star and lots of runes inside appeared in the middle of the wall. It glowed and the wall moved backwards, then slid down into an opening in the floor.

  The first thing I noticed was the webs. They occupied the walls, the floor and the ceiling of the bare earth stairs and the corridor ahead. The corridor was tight enough for me to touch both walls by extending my arms and low enough for me to touch the ceiling if I got on my toes. It was a mixed blessing: attacking spiders would only be able to attack one at a time, but I would also have trouble swinging my sword and dodging attacks. Good thing I had bought myself better armor.

  There was a small brown button on the corridor wall, easily visible. Why couldn't it have been that way on the basement's side?

  With my sword in one hand, my shield on the other arm, and three death spheres floating above me, I descended the stairs.

  I soon found out I had to use raw strength just to move. The webs on the floor were sticky and even though I could force my feet to unstick, it was not easy. Bad news for my mobility and my battles.

  Still, I moved on. It was possible that the webs were limited to that corridor and I could find myself in better terrain ahead.

  The corridor was long and together with the sticky floor, it took me almost ten minutes of walking to get to the end.

  Damn cook, if only she would teach me some fire magic, I could burn all this shit to ashes.

  The corridor ended in a cave chamber. It was small if compared to the enormous chambers I was used to seeing in the Underworld, but still around four or five football fields in size. There were eggs all over the floor and walls, and almost a hundred spiders were tending them – mostly young ones but also some twenty spitters and about ten bigger, tough looking dark gray ones.

  And in the center of it all stood the Queen. Capital letter Queen, no doubt about it.

  She was double to triple my height, a woman's torso attached to spider legs. The legs were big, black and covered by hard scales. The shells continued up her feminine upper body and covered her back, side, and breasts, while leaving the stomach uncovered. Her lips were red and full, and twelve black spider eyes covered the rest of her head. Grotesque.

  There was no way in hell I would be able to kill them all. And this was a B rated quest? How the hell was the game even measuring it? Even if I tried to kill them one by one in the corridor and they didn't kill me, I would still run out of stamina and fall exhausted on the floor.

  Unless I pulled them. In gaming, pulling a monster or a few of them was done exactly in situations like this. I would attack, attract their attention, then fall back into an advantageous position. If they all came at me I would still die, but I felt confident that if only a few dozen came each time, I could kill them all in one on one fights.

  Only one thing stood between this plan and execution: the web-covered floor. I couldn't run on it, therefore I couldn't get to the advantageous position without dying.

  After unsuccessfully trying to remove the silk with my sword and with darkness and death magic, I ended with only two possibilities: buying something that could create fire or learning fire magic myself.

  Ten minutes later I was kneeling on the kitchen floor, my head on the floor. "Please, miss. Please. I beg of you."

  "I told you no!" The chubby cook hit my head with the big spoon. "Get out of my kitchen!"

  "I need it! Not for me, for you! So you can safely get ingredients in the basement. But the spiders have webs all over the place and I need to burn them away before fighting them or I'll die."

  "I don't care! You are getting in the way of my work. Get out! Now!" She hit me again. She wasn't going easy on me and it hurt a lot.

  "Just teach me and I promise I will never bother you again. I promise."

  "By the Devourer! Get out!"

  "Please!"

  She was furious. "I." She hit my head. "Told." She hit again, this time with a heavy pan. "You." Another hit. I began to bleed. "No!" This time the power of the hit made my nose crush on the floor.

  I didn't move. I wouldn't stay there forever, but I could afford one or two hours of groveling before searching for a fire-making tool.

  "Blease!" My nose had broken and was bleeding. "I beg ov you!"

  She sighed. "I'll get my husband." I heard her leaving, used the opportunity to heal myself, and heard her coming back with another set of steps. "He won't let me do my job!"

  "Undead," the innkeeper said with a much more angered voice than I expected, "you must not upset my wife. What are you doing?"

  "I am begging her to teach me fire magic. I need it to kill the spiders."

  "Devourer above! Even if she wanted to, she can't teach you! Only the Temple priests can teach magic in Ter'nodril. Now, get out of here before-"

  "Can I just watch?" I raised my head.

  "What?!" They both asked at the same time.

  "Can I watch her doing magic? I'm a mage myself, it might be enough."

  "The Temple-"

  "Would never know I learned from her, and even if they did, she'll not teach me. I can watch any number of mages doing magic; it's not teaching."

  "Why watch my wife, then?" He was suspicious. Was that jealousy?

  "Because she is the closest fire mage I know of. And because she will stay at the same place doing magic over and over again. If I ask another adventurer, I might have to leave Ter'nodril and your spider problem will continue."

  "Why do you need fire magic to kill them? If I'm not mistaken these morbs above your head are death magic, aren't they?"

  Morbs? That's what these spheres are called, then?

  "They are, but there's a field of webs I must go through and death magic can't destroy what's not alive. I need fire."

  "Why not use a tool? There are crystals for this. Not everyone has the luxury of learning fire magic just to cook."

  "Hey! Bar guy! We want beer!" Someone yelled from the mess hall.

  "Coming!" The innkeeper yelled back.

  "Because," I said slowly while trying to think of an excuse, "I am a mage. I know how to effectively use magic and if I need to burn a web in the middle of a fight I won't have the time to get the crystal." I almost sighed in relief for my quick reasoning. "Also, buying my new equipment cost me all the money I had," I lied.

  He looked thoughtful at me for a few moments. "What does the Blackguard think of this? Would it be against the Ways to allow him to watch?"

>   I believed he was talking to his wife until I heard a young woman's voice behind me. "No." I turned quickly and saw a Blackguard a few meters away, black cloak and hood. "The Ways do determine only the Dark Temple can teach, but it doesn't say only those in the Dark Temple can learn."

  "You were there the whole time?" I asked.

  "Obviously." She didn't elaborate.

  "Did you go downstairs with me?"

  "Obviously not."

  "You like talking like this, don't you?"

  I think I heard a hint of a smile in her voice. "Obviously."

  "Well, it's settled," said the innkeeper. The cook tried to say something, but he raised his hand. "I know you don't like undead, Larantha, but he has a point." He turned to me. "You have six hours. My wife will work as she always does and you can watch. Quietly and out of the way."

  I doubted I would learn fire magic by myself in six hours if this was the real world. But I was in a game. Players who wished to were supposed to be able to learn magic, and how difficult could it be for a mage to learn a new element?

  "Alright," I nodded to him.

  * * *

  As it turned out, it was difficult enough.

  Five hours had passed by, I watched the cook creating a fire morb for the thousandth time. She then proceeded to use a spell that made the morb go under the pan and become the equivalent of a gas range fire.

  I had moved close to her and yet again I closed my eyes and began to focus my will against the place I knew the flame was, as I had done with the illusion. Just like all magic I had tested until now, the flame appeared in the mind's eye for a split second. It was nice seeing the color red in the grey and black world.

  I kept trying to will the fire to obey me, or to talk to me, or something, but nothing happened. I had looked at the fire for minutes and minutes, trying to feel something different from it, and it mocked me, its flames licking the pan indifferent to my struggles.

  Larantha, the cook, ignored me completely as she worked. I had even asked her if she even slept and she didn't bother answering.

  Frustrated and with a single hour to the time limit, I did the last thing I could think of: I walked to the pan, took off my glove and put my hand on the fire.

  It confirmed what I had been wondering; the game reduced the pain input to the players. It still hurt like hell and the smell of burnt skin and meat filled the air, but I was able to grit my teeth and not scream. Meanwhile, I looked at my burning hand and tried to feel something magical out of it.

  "What are you doing?!" The cook yelled in a startled tone and pulled my hand out of the fire.

  "I'm trying to understand the magic."

  "Idiot! By the Devourer, how do you think losing your hand will help you understand magic? The physical has nothing to do with the-" She put both her hands on her mouth and looked around scared. When nothing happened she pushed me away. "I don't care what my husband said. Get out of my kitchen! Now! Or you'll get us both killed!"

  I obeyed this time, since she used a good argument. She had almost spilled the beans and making her die for teaching me would be bad for my business with her husband. Dying myself also wouldn't help.

  Opening the door to the basement, I sat on the stairs. My hand was throbbing and I felt tears streaming from my eyes. I cleaned the tears and instead of water I saw blood.

  I cry blood. That's pretty neat.

  My hand was a mess but no enlightenment had found me because of it; in the end it had been a useless endeavor. I healed myself and laid down on the stairs.

  What was I missing? Miss Fire Mage had said the physical had nothing to do with 'something', and I bet that this something would be either 'the spiritual' or 'magic.' It didn't make sense to be magic, though, since magic affected the material world directly.

  Spiritual, then, or something close to it. The physical had nothing to do with the spiritual, and I was trying to do magic. Did it mean magic was somehow related to a spiritual thing? If so, and if the physical was indeed as far from the spiritual as the cook had said, it made sense to see magic as a way to make the spiritual affect the physical.

  I could understand the physical world as well as the next man. I could do magic and see how it affected the physical. But I had no idea of how the magic affected or was affected by the spiritual.

  Where did magic even come from? Yes, I had to use my magical energy, also called MP, to use magic, but where did it come from? Energy was just that, energy. For all I knew, electricity was a kind of energy and most technology in the real world needed it to work.

  So, magic needed my magical energy to work? When I used mana, a morb – weird word – would form. Depending on the source I used, be it death of small vermin or the darkness, a different type of morb would form. Somehow both types of magic used the same energy source to come into life, which proved that the mana points were a mean to an end, not the source of magic itself.

  Right? Let's suppose so.

  Where did magic come from, then? From the darkness? From death? It made no sense. Darkness was simply the lack of light. Death was simply the moment when something stopped living. They were physical phenomena and if they could lead to magic, the real world would also be swarming with mages all around. Or at least magic would happen spontaneously in nature.

  Therefore, magic came from a source. The death of the vermin released something that I used to create a death morb. Was it the source? It made some sense: the source of death magic was death, the source of darkness magic was darkness and the source of fire magic would be fire.

  However, even if they did come from those sources, death and darkness were not something that could be physically handled. They were magical representations of the physical, only that.

  Or were they spiritual representations of the physical? In a spiritual or parallel world, not bound by the laws of physics, darkness could exist by itself, as an element. When I used darkness magic I was not amassing darkness from the shadows I could see, but I was getting living shadows from the spiritual world, burning mana to transport the spiritual element to the physical world. The same happened to the death magic.

  If that was so, why couldn't I do the same for fire magic, then? Was I tapping the wrong place in the spiritual world? I knew for a fact that fire in the physical world was not the source, since the cook didn't need a fire going to make it appear out of thin air. I frowned. Why, then, did I need darkness or death around me to create my morbs?

  Was the cook a master mage or something?

  Supposing she wasn't, I should be able to do the same as her. Concentrating, I tried to create a darkness sphere without willing the darkness around me to come. Nothing happened.

  But if what I usually did was using the shadows of this world as a representation of something in a spiritual world, I would need to think of the shadows in the spiritual world instead.

  A spiritual world. Something like this world. I created this image on my mind, of a world like this but without me, without the cook, devoid of people, a world that looked like this one but was not like it, a world superimposed upon this one, like a 3D image without the glasses. As I willed the shadows of that world to come to me and...

  Nothing happened.

  Frustrated, I sighed. A source had to exist; a source not in the physical world. A source that both I and the cook could tap into, using mana to transport the element from that world to a morb in this world.

  Why did I need a physical representation and she didn't? Could it be that I was doing things the easy way, using things my mind could see and comprehend while she was doing things in some unknown arcane way?

  No; if that was the case, I would have been able to take the easy path by using the existing fire in the kitchen to create my magic.

  Was it all tied to having the right skill, then? I had unlocked both darkness and death magic skill trees when I created my character. Did I have to go through some type of ritual now that would unlock the fire magic skill tree? If so, how had the first mages learne
d? Well, that was obvious: they had received magic from the gods. And there was no law against the gods being created knowing how to make magic themselves.

  But that also would go against what had happened in the conversation in the kitchen. The innkeeper was worried that I could learn fire magic just by watching the cook and had even asked for permission from the Blackguard. This meant that there was no ritual. The Guard had also confirmed that I could learn, but I trusted her less than I trusted the fear of the innkeeper for his life.

  So, there was a source and there was a way to get fire from it. It was not the same way to get darkness nor death. When I created a darkness morb, it was like liquid darkness shot from the world's shadows and formed into a magical sphere. When I created a death morb, it was like taking a smoky something released from dying animals and putting it together. From what I remembered from High Lady Renno, the creation of the death sphere was not something visible in the physical world.

  Just to make sure it was the same with my own magic, I closed my eyes, killed a lot of ants nearby, and opened my eyes before using the death energy to create a morb. I couldn't see nor affect the death energy I knew was there.

  Wait, energy. I was instinctively calling the death stuff an energy. If that was right, the morb was created by using two different energy sources: mana and the desired element. Death energy was invisible to the naked eye, so was darkness up to the moment I willed it into a morb. If all sources were invisible, actual fire couldn't be the source.

  Where the hell was the invisible fire energy, then? And why did I need to use two energy sources in the first place?

  What if it was only one source, mana, being changed? What if I was the real source and all that happened when I willed the shadows to gather was my mana going there and turning into the element? And when I did the same to the death 'energy', I was actually using the death of the vermin to change my mana into death energy, and then gathering it.

  There was an easy way to check. I looked at my mana bar.

  MP: 355 / 370

  Yes! I had lost mana when I killed the vermin even though I hadn't amassed the death energy. I had been looking it the wrong way. I didn't need to know the source of the magic, I only needed to understand the process.