by Logan Jacobs
There had to be more to it than that.
I looked over at the wall and reread the prophecy or legend or whatever it was a few more times. There wasn’t any hint to using my power, but it also didn’t specify that death was my only option. If I was brought back to the moment I was summoned every time I died, I would have to keep repeating the day over and over until I literally never died.
“I’ve never seen Groundhog Day,” I sighed. “But this is kind of a weird version of it. I don’t want to wake up under Raijin’s dagger every damn day. Maybe I can save my spot?”
Video games usually had a kind of menu or very specific locations where the player could save their progress. But how was I supposed to do something like that without a proper interface or tutorial to show me how?
“Fuuuuck,” I groaned and laid back against the stone.
The idiot sorcerer probably knew, but I really didn’t want to have to off myself just to fight him all over again.
I laid there and stared at the ceiling for a while before I just decided to wing it. If I focused on the stone dais hard enough, maybe something would happen? The worst was that I ended up looking like an idiot, but I was the only one here to see, so who cared?
I closed my eyes and concentrated on the stone beneath me. If I could, I wanted to come back to this place if something happened to me. To this exact moment, after I had already defeated Raijin and his lackeys. I probably could have killed them easily if I gave it another go, but I already had the sorcerer’s monologue memorized like a song stuck in my head. I was ready for something new.
A tingling sensation began in my fingers and toes, and it crawled rapidly up my body. Once the tingling hit my shoulders and hips, a burning heat started at my extremities. I feared the intense heat and pain from my numerous deaths, but this was more of a pleasant warmth that wrapped around me like a blanket. When the warmth hit my heart, a little chime rang through the room.
The warmth faded quickly, and I opened my eyes once more. If my theory was correct, that was only half of my true ability. I scrambled from the dais and left the room. There was no gust of wind this time so it must have been some kind of activator for the text on the wall. I walked down the hall until I could no longer see the dais from where I stood. Then I concentrated hard on the moment I had just created, of me sitting on the stone slab just after I had defeated the sorcerer and his minions.
Chime.
Ice shot through me just as I heard the familiar bell, and I gasped. The feeling lasted the length of a heartbeat before it was replaced with a total numbness. One moment I was in the hallway, the next I was laying on the dais once more, and the sorcerer was still dead on the ground where he was supposed to be.
I was right. My power was the ability to create a savepoint and reload whenever I wanted to.
Holy shit.
This was fucking awesome.
No wonder the sorcerer was so interested in me. Being able to repeat a day when something went wrong was as good as immortality. I might fail a thousand times as I had with the sorcerer, but in the end, I would always come out on top. There was nothing that could defeat me if I could just go back in time and do it all over a different way.
The sorcerer also had no idea that I was just repeating the battle. He greeted me each time like it was the first time. All he knew was that my power would make him unstoppable, but he had no idea what I could truly do. Nobody would know that I was just repeating myself over and over until I got it perfect. They would all see me come in like a total badass.
And that was fine by me.
I decided to check the stats of the sorcerer’s staff. It hadn’t produced any epic magical feat when I tried to use it, but it was probably because I didn’t actually know any spells. Staves and wands could just be tools to concentrate magic in this world.
The moment I touched the staff, another floating text box appeared above it.
Durability - 95%
Weight - 1 lbs
Quality - High
Magical Aspect - None
Magical Ability - +10% magnification to spells cast.
The durability was greater than the dagger, but since I wasn’t about to go hitting people upside the head with it, the blade was still the superior weapon choice. Its magical ability was just a magnification to spells, which probably meant that I would have to learn some kind of magic from somewhere before the staff would be of any use to me.
“I never got my letter from Hogwarts, sooooo…” I dropped the thing and it hit the ground with a clatter.
I looted among the dead cronies and found a variety of weapons but nothing else. They didn’t have any supplies on them that would be useful to me. No matches, no money, no canteens or leather pouches for carrying water. They didn’t have any food or even a freaking pocket knife on them.
Wherever I was, there had to be some kind of settlement nearby. Either a town or a base of operations for the bad guys.
I was probably gonna have to kill some more Raijin cronies when I got outta here, wasn’t I?
I was able to summon the stats of each weapon when I touched the blades, and none of the daggers could even compare to the sorcerer’s. The swords came in a wide variety of durability, but their weight was always about three pounds, and none of them had any magic aspect to them. I grabbed the most durable sword of the bunch, even though it was barely above sixty-percent.
The sword wasn’t anything fancy, and I would have been surprised if a cheapskate like Raijin had splurged on arming his minions well. It was like a one-handed Knight’s sword. The blade of the sword was about the length of my arm and had several chips along both edges from use. The grip was made of rough leather, and the round thing at the end had no emblem or decoration whatsoever. The guard between the grip and the blade was just a simple strip of metal, and the left side of it was shorter than the right for some reason.
All that mattered for now was that it had a pointy end that could pierce anything I needed to kill, and it seemed like it could do at least that much.
I was just about to leave the room when I thought of another use for my powers.
What if I could spam my saves and get weapons with different stats?
It was a long shot, but what was the harm in trying it out? I had all the time in the world to mess around and test out my skills, and wasn’t it better to know the extent of my abilities as soon as possible?
Chime.
I shuddered as the icy feeling shot through me, and I scrambled over to the nearest dead body to pull out his sword. I couldn’t remember exactly which weapon had which stat, but as I retrieved each sword, I saw that their stats were exactly the same.
“Aw, bummer,” I said. “So… by that logic, there is no random loot generation. I’m guessing that I’m not in a video game. I just have the ability to restart from a save point and look at the stats of weapons.”
I swung the sword a few times and frowned at the whopping sixty-two-percent durability stat. It was kind of pathetic when compared to the dagger, but a sword had a longer reach, and even a dull blade could knock heads around if I swung it hard enough. I had no idea if the sharpness of the blade was related to the durability state, but I remembered a YouTube video I watched where some survival guy had used a whetstone to sharpen a dull blade. I was pretty sure the spelling was different because I doubted any old wet stone would do the trick. If I couldn’t figure it out, maybe someone at the settlement nearby could teach me.
Assuming the settlement wasn’t full of bad guys trying to kill me.
“No more call center work for me!” I grinned as I finally left the dais room and walked down the long stone corridor. I had been transported to some fantasy land, and I was pretty much a god. Nobody could cut me down, and I could never make a wrong turn or say something stupid to someone and get punched in the face. If I did, I’d just chime back to the start and then do it over again until I got it right.
I was invincible.
The air in the tunnels w
as damp, cool, and filled with the scent of wet stone, moss, and earth. It was so much nicer to breathe than the choking blood and death of the dais room. The walls were made of the same dark gray rock as the room I had just left, and torches filled the tunnel with flickering light every few feet. The sound of water dripping echoed from somewhere deeper in the catacombs, and it made me think of how thirsty I was. There was no chance of me drinking from the walls, though, since I was kind of surrounded by dead people.
I came to the first intersection and glanced at both possible paths. The right was free of any obstacles and continued on for several yards before turning. The left path had a dead minion shish-kebabed on a set of giant spikes, and his blood was still dripping from the wounds.
“Well, that’s pretty fucking obvious,” I snickered.
I should have guessed that there would be traps in a place like this. If the Great Catacombs were the only place that the God of Time could be summoned, it wasn’t the kind of place any old wanderer should be able to navigate. The catacombs themselves had probably been long buried, and all of the maps leading to it had been burned long ago or something. That’s what I would have done if I wanted to keep an all-powerful being from getting summoned by a moronic sorcerer.
What it really meant was that Raijin and his cronies had probably left me a gruesome breadcrumb trail leading right to the entrance. All I had to do was follow the tunnels and follow the path that didn’t have a dead minion shish-kebabed on spikes.
I followed the breadcrumbs, and every few turns I came across a man crumpled on the floor or burnt to a crisp or at the bottom of a pit of spikes. I almost felt sorry for these guys, but if it meant that I had spent less time fighting in the dais room because of their loss, then I really couldn’t be too upset. Fourteen cronies had been bad enough, but it seemed that the sorcerer had brought a small horde with him, since I counted an additional eight dead cronies before I reached a long straight tunnel.
The tunnel was much of the same wet-gray rock covered in moss as the rest of the labyrinth, but there was a very faint breeze that brought the fresh scent of trees and growing things from somewhere. I picked up the pace until I was practically running around the remaining twists and turns of the labyrinth.
A few minutes later, I turned a corner to find sunlight spilling into the tunnel in front of me, and I had to slow my pace and bring an arm up to shield my eyes against the glare. The fresh scents intensified along with the calls of birds and the rustling of leaves in the trees, and I inhaled deeply as I guessed at what this world would look like.
I was just about to step across the threshold when a thought occurred to me. What if there were other rooms like mine within the catacombs? I doubted there were other all-powerful gods like myself waiting to be summoned, but there could always be some loot lying around. My respawning powers made it so I never had to actually worry about getting lost or dying forever. Was there really any harm in having a quick look-see?
Part of me knew that there wasn’t really going to be anything for me to take from the tomb. Why would anyone store items in a place like this? The dead couldn’t use money or weapons, and it wasn’t like this was an Egyptian pyramid where there were organs and stuff in jars. Not that there was anything wrong with preserving the guts of some dead guy for him in the next life. I just didn’t see the point, since he was already dead.
But a much larger part of me was playing the devil-on-my-shoulder bit. What if this world was like Zelda or Diablo, and there was all sorts of cool shit in the pots and jars? I had nothing to lose by spending my time exploring the labyrinth. If I didn’t find any loot, was I really going to be upset? I already had a pretty awesome dagger, and even if the sword left something to be desired, there was a good chance of a town being close by. I could always barter for a new one if I didn’t find any money lying around.
Plus, I wouldn’t know there was nothing for me to find if I didn’t actually go looking for it in the first place.
My gamer-brain refused to let me leave the catacombs without a thorough investigation. In every game with a dungeon like this, there was always some kind of treasure waiting to be found. In some ways, I kind of was the treasure, but there might be something else down the passages the sorcerer hadn’t searched. I highly doubted that I was going to find anything useful, but if I went in expecting nothing and actually found something, it would be like a little surprise for myself.
“We are going for a hundred-percent map completion.” I started to backtrack to the first shish-kebabed cronie just outside of the dais room. At first, I thought I was just going to get lost. The last trap before the entrance had been a pitfall trap, and every time I turned a corner and didn’t find it, I had to fight back the sense of alarm. It wasn’t like getting lost was a real possibility. I could just respawn to the dais room and follow the macabre trail again.
But even though I knew that I had this power, it was still so new and weird that my squishy normal self was trying to bring up fears that were irrational to the God of Time. After all, I could just do things over again if I didn’t like the way they turned out the first or ten-thousandth time.
I made the decision to respawn in the dais room when I rounded the next corner and found the pitfall trap. Retracing my steps from that point was easy, and I had to fight the smile that tugged at my lips every time I came across the next trap. It was how I knew I was getting to where I needed to be but it was so disrespectful of the dead to be happy to see the activated traps.
Knowing I had a get-out-of-jail-free card meant that the word caution left my vocabulary as I wandered through the catacombs. I didn’t bother looking around each corner for an ambush, because it didn’t matter. I would just respawn at the dais, find where the enemies were waiting, and kill them all.
However, the catacombs seemed to be completely empty. My footsteps echoed as I walked through the tunnels, and there was the occasional dripping of water somewhere, but there were no other sounds. At least the air was clean compared to the blood-drenched air of the room with the stone dais.
The first dead end I came to was just an abrupt wall in the tunnel, and there hadn’t been any kind of trap waiting to be activated. There was no room to loot, no treasure, no enemies, nothing. I backtracked and took a different branch of the tunnel, but this also led to another dead end with nothing waiting for me.
“Stupid map design,” I growled as I backtracked once more and turned down a different branch. There was a room at the very end of it, so I picked up the pace until I was jogging down the corridor.
And then I was squashed between the ceiling and a wall that popped out of the ground.
Chime.
I respawned on the dais with the kind of deep breath people take after being underwater for a long time. My heart started pounding erratically from the sudden death, and I had to place my hand over my chest to keep the damn muscle from bursting free and running out on me. There was no lingering pain from the crushing blow, aside from my wounded pride at having been taken out by one of the traps.
But now I was even more eager to check out that room. Traps weren’t laid out if there wasn’t something interesting that needed protection, so I scrambled from the dais and grabbed my pitiful sixty-two-percent sword. My eye caught the useless staff once more, and I decided to bring it along. The trap had been activated somehow, either from a tripwire or just passing over the underground wall. The staff was just the thing to use as a test. Better to break it than me.
I returned to the wall-trap hallway and walked a little more slowly this time. I held the staff out in front of me like a blind man’s walking stick, and let out a very unmanly shriek when the wall sprang up from the floor. The sound echoed all around me, and I really hoped there was nobody in the catacombs to hear it. The staff was snatched from my hands as it was broken like a twig, and the once-glowing rock at the tip of the staff clattered to the floor.
Once the tunnel was clear again, I picked up the broken shard of staff and waved it o
ver the trap. I kept my grip loose on the staff in case the wall jumped back up again, but it was a one-time-only kind of trap. I grinned at my genius and continued into the room ahead.
It was smaller than the dais room and aside from a bunch of coffins in the walls, there was nothing of interest. Every game I had ever played warned me against pushing back the lids of those coffins. With my luck, I would awaken a super powerful Lich Lord and get blown to smithereens in seconds. But what did that matter? Even if a Lich Lord appeared and killed me, I would just respawn in the dais room and do it over again.
No risk, no reward.
“It’s still fucking scary, though…” I ignored my pounding heart as I threw all of my weight against the nearest coffin lid. The stone growled as it ground together, and when there was enough of a gap for a Lich Lord to rise, I leaped back and drew my two weapons.
Nothing happened.
There was a skeleton in the coffin, but it was desiccated to the point that the skull turned to dust when I poked it with my dagger. I opened the other three coffins at ground level, but was met with the same nothingness. The placards beneath the coffins had various names on them, but none of them meant anything to me. I assumed that they had been really important people when they were alive, and that would warrant the trap to protect them in the afterlife.
Instead of wasting my time with backtracking, I just reloaded and spawned back in the dais room. I grabbed the sword and staff again to use as a trap detector and chose a different path to explore. I came across dead ends more than traps, but the staff served its purpose very well. Only once was I killed, and that was because the floor suddenly vanished beneath me and not even the staff could save me from fall damage.
In the end, there was no treasure of any kind hidden in the catacombs. I couldn’t even find any hidden rooms, although I must have touched every single freaking rock in the place. I returned to the dais room for the last time, grabbed my sword, and followed the dead minions’ bodies back to the entrance.