by Aleron Kong
Richter channeled the energies of his spell. The dual casting that had given him such problems in the past now flowed easily and almost without thought. Independent of any conscious decision, both of his hands had half bent into claws and then came together until they were almost touching. He called out a frantic mental warning to Alma, and two sparks of light appeared in the cage his hands made. THREE!
The sparks combined and formed a brilliant arc of white lightning, much brighter than any other he had ever created. The crackling bolt shot towards the space Alma had just vacated. His aim was true and the lightning sped across the distance to the eagle in a time span measured in milliseconds. The electrical attack impacted against the large bird, and the energy overloaded whatever internal process gave it flight. Its wings locked into place and it plummeted to the ground. When it struck, it was with a horrible clanging crash. The bird was only ten feet away from him. Richter finished his count with satisfaction. Four.
He reached for his sword. His hand grasped the hilt, but before he could draw it free, a hand grasped his shoulder and spun him around. A large black fist crashed into his face and his body flew through the air. Teeth and blood filled the back of his throat, and the vertebrae of his neck ground together as they struggled to protect the delicate spaghetti of his spinal cord. He lost consciousness before he even struck the ground.
Alma cried out in her own mind. For the first time, her anger drove her to connect to a mind other than her master’s. *Leave him alone!* A yellow glow enveloped her body again and lightning shot towards the giant. Nexus just smiled that same arrogant grin.
As soon as light began to surround Alma, the giant raised his hand. A disc of crystalline light appeared and the lightning bolt was drawn to it. The disc absorbed the energy and then with a pulse, fired it back to the dragonling. Alma was struck in the head by her own spell and collapsed just as the eagle had. The bones of one of her wings snapped, and the gash in her side widened, blood pulsing out onto the ground. Nexus tutted at her and cast another spell. A cage of purple light appeared over the dragonling, both keeping her constrained and draining her mana and stamina. He started walking towards Richter, but then paused and looked at the familiar. After a moment’s thought, he cast another short spell and gold light surrounded his fingers briefly before winking out again. Alma’s breathing eased as her wing straightened and her wound closed. The black giant didn’t spare her another look. The eagle stirred while Nexus stalked towards Richter.
Richter had hit the ground hard. Pain woke him back up, but this time, the damage was too severe for him to recover. His left shoulder had snapped out of joint and some nerve damage must have resulted, because he couldn’t move that arm at all. He turned his head to spit out the teeth and blood filling his mouth and then raggedly gasped for air. His face was a ruin and every breath was an agony as bone shards were driven deeper into his lungs. Richter tried to weave his fingers into a healing pattern, but he couldn’t recover enough air to breathe out the word of Power. Nonetheless, he tried until a black foot stomped down cruelly on his hand, snapping the bones. Richter cried out, blood spattering weakly from his ruined mouth, as he saw Nexus’s leering face look down at him. The eagle flew into view, slowly circling above them.
“How do you think the fight’s going?” Nexus asked in the smooth, cultured voice that he had first spoken in. “Personally, I think everything is going swimmingly.”
Richter glared up at the giant. Tears leaked out of his eyes, bringing shame to his heart, but the pain skyrocketed as Nexus pressed down harder on his ruined hand. Richter screamed again. The giant smiled and said, “Maybe we got off on the wrong foot. Foot, do you get it?” Nexus ground his heel down and Richter screamed until he started choking on his blood again. “Good! You do get it. As I was saying, we can stop all of this. It’s not necessary. I can send you home and you can forget all about the fact that I just made you my bitch. I won’t even kill that flying rat you seem so fond of. Now how does that sound?”
The eagle landed next to him and drove its sharp beak into his shoulder. Richter squirmed and screamed, but couldn’t move anywhere. Nexus started speaking again. “Come on. You don’t really need to be here. Let it go. All you need to say is, ‘I relinquish my Profession.’ Just four simple words. I mean is it really worth more of this?” Nexus whistled again and the eagle tore off a chunk of Richter’s shoulder, leaving a bloody hole that drained his blood onto the rocky ground. He passed out again.
Nexus twisted his foot, and Richter came back with a sob. Sweat from his forehead stung his eyes and mixed with his tears. Alma revived and cried out to him psychically, but the cage she was in made her too weak to even move, let alone aid him. She almost immediately sunk back into a spell-imposed stupor. Richter looked up again and saw Nexus arch an eyebrow at him, silently asking, “Well?”
Richter closed his eyes and mumbled his reply.
“What was that, old boy?” Nexus asked.
Richter coughed weakly and strained to get his limbs free, but still couldn’t. He spoke again, his words weak and garbled by the blood in his mouth.
Nexus sighed and went down on one knee. Richter almost passed out from relief when the pressure was relieved from his hand. The giant spoke softly. “Come on. I just have to hear you say the words and this is all over.” He forcefully grabbed the hair on top of Richter’s head and pulled the chaos seed’s face towards his own. “So what do you say?”
Richter looked Nexus in the eye and opened his mouth again. He inhaled and then spit a large glob of congealed blood into the man’s perfectly sculpted face. Richter began to laugh maniacally, both at his own audacity and in fearful denial of the retribution that he knew was to come as the bloody spittle oozed down Nexus’s cheek.
Nexus just continued to hold Richter by the hair as the spittle slowly oozed down his face. Then he shook his head slightly and said almost sympathetically, “Oh lad. You shouldn’t have done that.” As Nexus started to torture him, Richter learned the truth of that statement.
The black giant hurt him again and again. Richter tried distributing his unused attribute points in a bid to get strong enough to defeat his tormentor, but for the first time he couldn’t access his personal interface. Nexus smiled sadistically at him when he tried. With what had become a familiar tsk, tsk, tsk, he rained blows into Richter’s face until the chaos seed passed out.
Throughout the brutality, Nexus kept him just short of death, healing him when necessary. Intermixed with the torture, the giant kept up a running train of verbal abuse and questions. “Do you give up? Who do you think you are coming here? I’m not your enemy, you are! No one is going to help you. Why don’t you help yourself?” Richter wasn’t allowed to sleep and for some reason didn’t need to eat or drink. His world became only pain as layer by layer, his personality was stripped away to lay bare the core of what he was.
After what felt like days of brutality, Richter was limp. The only reason he was not lying in a heap on the ground was that he was held upright by glowing magical bands surrounding his chest. His feet were a few inches off of the floor. He had learned that this was one of Nexus’s favorite spells. It made escape impossible and left his body accessible for any torments that the giant could devise. Richter had tried to fight back several times, and each time it had triggered an even worse round of retribution. Nexus had just finished his latest attempt to break Richter’s will—dripping acid, which would burrow its way straight through him, all over his body—when the giant finally said something different.
“Maybe we can come to a deal. I’m actually getting tired of cutting and burning you. So how about this. You don’t actually need to say the words. Just give me… the most valuable thing in that Bag of yours. We will take that to be your acceptance of the inevitability of your situation. What did your people always say? The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. All that is going to happen if you stay here is I will keep hurting you. I will
hurt you until the stars burn out. Time moves differently in this place. I’m not making idle threats. I will break your mind until all that is left is a drooling ruin of who you used to be. Or”—Nexus’s face softened and his tone grew convincingly kind—“you can be reasonable, be logical, and help yourself.”
Richter looked at the giant. The finality in Nexus’s voice when he said he would keep hurting him had been terrifying. He believed that the giant would break his mind. He was already balancing on the edge of a precipice. If he had to endure much more, Richter felt like he might snap. He had come to hate the beautiful black face and golden hair of his tormentor, a face that often wore a sadistic smile.
Now though, Nexus’s face was a study of compassion. Richter knew he couldn’t trust him, but he wanted to believe that Nexus was telling him the truth. That everything would be okay if he just gave in. A deep part of him needed to believe that. It begged and pleaded to just be released from this hell. It was willing to give anything to just stop the pain and degradation.
A deeper part of himself, though, stood fast. If it was only his own wellbeing that was at stake, he would have succumbed long ago. Each time he got close, though, he thought about his people. He thought about Petal, who had died because of his foolishness and pride. He thought about Sedrin, who had been mauled because Richter hadn’t been strong enough to protect him. He thought about the upcoming battle with the bugbears and other enemies that would inevitably come to find them. Richter knew that whatever suffering he experienced now would be nothing compared to the anguish he would feel if he gave up and his people suffered because of it.
So he continued to look at Nexus trying to stall for time. He knew from experience that the giant wouldn’t wait long for an answer though, so he started inching his hand towards his Bag. Nexus’s ever present smug smile deepened, and his eyes widened slightly in anticipation. Richter’s hand went into the Bag. When he withdrew it, he slowly turned his arm until his fist was upright… with his middle finger extended.
Nexus looked at him in disbelief and Richter laughed, or sobbed, he wasn’t sure. “This is what I’m willing to offer. A big handful of ‘fuck you.’ So you better just fucking kill me because I won’t stop! That’s not who I am!”
Nexus’s expression became cruel and angry. The giant wove one hand in a series of gestures, and black and red light surrounded his body. Harsh guttural words of Power spewed from his lips and then he drove his hand into Richter’s chest. Pain worse than anything he had ever felt spread through Richter as his very soul was scorched. Nexus bellowed unintelligently into his face. Spittle landed on his cheek as the giant grabbed the back of Richter’s neck with his other hand and screamed, “Who the fuck do you think you are, you little shit?”
“My name is Enchanter!” Richter shouted. The answer had come without thought or guile. As soon as it was spoken, he felt the truth of what he had said. A loud bell rang three times and the giant took his hand away. The red and black fire died out, and Richter cried out in relief.
Nexus looked up into the darkness above and cocked his head, listening to something that Richter couldn’t hear. When Nexus looked down at him again, there was a smile on his face, but for the first time it wasn’t mocking. Instead, it seemed like a different person was looking at Richter from behind the chiseled black features.
Nexus began a casting and gold light surrounded his arms. When he was done, another light surrounded Richter’s body, and all of the pain left him. Muscle reknit and his bones bound together. Richter’s lacerated organs healed and his nerve damage was repaired. The many icons indicating the disabilities he had gained during his torture disappeared one by one until he was left whole. Nexus cast another spell, and a wave of green light restored his weapons and armor to perfect condition. With a final wave of his hand, Nexus released Richter from the bands that held him and released Alma from the cage that had kept her in an unnatural sleep for days on end.
Richter stared at the giant, thinking this must be the start to some new sick torment. Then he realized that whether it was or not, he had to help Alma. He circled around Nexus, never taking his eyes off the giant, then ran over to where his familiar lay on the ground. He picked her up and was relieved to feel her small chest rise and fall. Richter was relieved to see that she didn’t have any obvious injuries. She stirred and then opened her eyes. She looked at him, licked his face, and then asked, *Did we win, Master?*
He smiled down at her. *Yes, my love. We won.* He didn’t have the heart to tell her that these might be their final moments together.
She closed her eyes again and purred. Richter placed her atop his shoulders and she settled in comfortably. When she wrapped her tail around his arm for balance and fell back asleep, Richter turned his attention to Nexus.
The black giant still stood in the same place. His hands were at his side and he calmly regarded Richter. “Do you remember what you said?”
Richter licked his lips. “I said…” Nexus nodded encouragingly. “I said, ‘I am Enchanter.’”
“So you are, Tim,” Nexus said with a bow of his head. “It has been my honor to help you uncover this truth.”
“Uncover what?” Richter screamed at the giant. His arms and legs shook uncontrollably, though he couldn’t honestly say which emotion he was feeling at that moment. Anger, fear, sadness, joy… his nerves were scraped raw and all of his feelings felt like a live wire searing his brain. “That I wanted to become an Enchanter? I could have told you that! You didn’t have to torture me! It felt like days, you sadistic fuck!”
Nexus weathered Richter’s verbal assault without reaction. When he was done shouting, the giant replied, “You did not become an Enchanter. You have learned that you have always been one. A Profession is not a choice. It is not who you are, it is what you are. I stripped away the surface layers, the ‘who’ of how you define yourself, so that you could see the truth of ‘what’ you really are. You are an Enchanter. In time, you may find other truths about yourself.”
Richter looked at Nexus, still seething, but the giant’s words held the same feeling of immutable truth that he had felt when he had named himself “Enchanter.” He stared and asked the only question that seemed pertinent, “So what now?”
“Now you return home. From the viewpoint of your villagers, you will have been gone for one week. As I said, though, time moves differently here. Though you have experienced several weeks of pain, your body has only aged a fraction of that time. Before you go, however, I was asked to give you a message—‘Hurry.’”
Richter looked at Nexus for a long moment. “Is there any more to it? If not, you might as well tell me not to go chasing waterfalls! And given a message by who?” He could finally identify what he was feeling. Perhaps the oldest emotion. Anger. A distant and reasonable part of his mind posited that speaking harshly to a powerful being that had just tortured him with impunity might be a bad idea. Another part of him told that part to fuck off though. If Nexus were going to attack him again, it probably wouldn’t be for being snarky.
Nexus smiled slightly, again with real humor, completely different from the cruel grin Richter had grown used to seeing. “I was told that you had something to do before you were brought here. Specifically, that you had seven hours and fourteen minutes before your leveling decisions were taken out of your hands. When you arrive back into your village, your personal time will have advanced by seven hours and twelve minutes. Hence, the message ‘Hurry.’”
“Let me get this straight,” Richter said slowly and with intense irritation. “You have been torturing me for a month, but only a week has passed in The Land, AND I’ve only aged seven hours? That makes no damn sense.”
Nexus smiled wider. “He told me that you would say that. Then he said I should tell you Time is not linear. It’s more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly timey whimey stuff.”
Richter had been about to tell Nexus to wipe the stupid smile off his face, but then he stopped. He knew that he had heard that before, he
just couldn’t place where. “Who gave you the message?”
Nexus cast a spell, silently bringing a black disc into existence behind Richter. He ignored Richter’s question and said, “It’s actually kind of lucky that you started your Trial when you did. If you had finished spending your level points before you came here, you would have been treated as if you were level twenty-eight rather than level twenty-one. Those extra Talent points you might have wasted will probably come in handy. It’s almost like you have someone looking out for you.” Nexus’s expression seemed to indicate that Richter should be picking up on something.
“Wait! What do you mean? Give me a straight answer god damn y—”
Nexus rushed forward and pushed Richter backwards into the disc. The last thing he saw was the smiling giant winking at him, then everything was black.
CHAPTER 22
“He has returned! Lord Richter has returned!”
Richter raised his head up from the grass. Looking around he realized he was in the feast area, and judging by the smells, it was mealtime. He didn’t really remember how he got here, but he must have hit with some speed because his face had been driven into the ground. He had to spit a bit of turf out of his mouth as his people rushed up. It wasn’t exactly the dignified homecoming he would have hoped for, but at least he was home. Alma flew in front of him and licked his face while Richter groggily looked around. His mind was having trouble processing.
As the villagers surged around him, babbling, Richter tried to make sense of what was in his head, but his memories felt… compressed. He quickly replayed the events of the last few days, shuddering sometimes as he relived a particularly bad moment. It took only seconds, but then he remembered the message Nexus had relayed at the end and his heart began to pound. He quickly checked his status page and saw that he did indeed still have points to distribute. If Nexus was right, though, he only had two minutes to do it after coming back, and he had already wasted at least one of them!