Magium

by Chris Michael Wilson

  When I turn my head around, I notice that Kate is currently staring at Melindra, with a shocked expression on her face.

  “Hmm?…” Melindra says, with an intrigued look in her eyes, as soon as she sees Kate staring at her.

  She then squeezes my arm even harder, while she’s still looking at Kate, to see her reaction. Once Kate realizes what Melindra is doing, she turns her face away, in disgust.

  “Hmm…” Melindra says, this time with a smile.

  “Don’t worry, love,” the first mage tells Melindra. “We’re not walking away anywhere. At least not until you guys empty your pockets and your backpacks, to show us if you have any pinecones with you…”

  “Are you serious?” Daren says, almost breaking into a laugh while saying that last word.

  “Heh,” Hadrik says. “I guess not every mage in the world can recognize you by your scar, eh, Daren?”

  “That or they don’t care,” Illuna says. “They were mad enough to join this tournament, after all.”

  “We don’t have time for this,” Kate says, as she stops hiding her aura, and she shoots three ice daggers in front of the first mage’s feet.

  “Aaah!” the mage screams like a little girl, with a terrified look in his eyes, as he finally understands the situation he’s in. “A banshee! It’s a banshee! What are you guys still standing here for? Run for your lives, you idiots! Run as fast as your feet can carry you!”

  He then jumps over the small river, and he heads into the forest, as all of his companions hurry to follow their leader.

  “Are you going to let go of my arm, now?” I ask Melindra.

  “Of course, of course!” Melindra says, as she casually releases my arm. “There’s no need to be so upset. It was only a joke!”

  “That’s lovely,” I say. “Now how about you take the lead, like before, and leave me alone?”

  “Will you come and walk by my side if I go take the lead?” Melindra says.

  “I will do no such thing,” I say.

  “Then I’ll stay here, thank you very much,” Melindra says.

  “Woah…” Hadrik says, with a grin, as he looks towards us. “Did something happen during that break we took earlier, Barry? Do you have anything that you might want to tell us?”

  “Shut up,” I tell him.

  “Leave them alone,” Daren tells Hadrik. “I’m sure that Melindra will get bored eventually, and then things will go back to normal. We already know the direction that we need to go in, so we don’t need a guide for now. Come on, follow me.”

  Just like Daren said, after about an hour or two of walking, Melindra finally got bored of pestering me, and she went to talk with Flower, who appears to be the only member of the team that she actually gets along with, so far. We spent the rest of the day travelling, without getting into any more fights, although we did run into several groups of mages, who seemed to be very busy gathering pinecones from trees, and stuffing them into their backpacks.

  When we decided that it was finally time to make camp, we started placing our tents not too far away from the river that we’d been following since noon. Melindra didn’t really seem to want to spend time with our group any longer than she needed to, so as soon as she was done leading us, she went to the river bank, to see if she could find some more rocks to add to her collection.

  As soon as we were done setting up the tents, I immediately pulled out my notebook, because there were a few things that I wanted to check before going to sleep.

  While I flip through the pages, I suddenly notice an old page where I wrote some notes about the stat device, and one particular phrase catches my attention. According to my old data, the stat booster was supposed to gather more energy from the air, if powerful spells were cast around it, but I’ve never actually seen this happen since I came to Varathia. Realizing that I may need more info on the subject, I decide to go ask some questions to the only other person in the camp that has more knowledge of stat devices than me.

  As I go over to Leila, I notice that she was still in the middle of a conversation with Kate.

  “Hey, Leila,” I say. “Got a minute? There was something I wanted to ask you about your stat device.”

  “Of course…” Leila writes.

  “Since when were you the studious type?” Kate asks me, while raising an eyebrow, after seeing the notebook that I’m still holding in my hands. “I’ve never seen you use that notebook before, but now you seem to be reading from it all the time.”

  “Oh, I used to write in this notebook every day before coming to Varathia,” I say. “It’s just that I kind of had to put that hobby to the side, for a while, because I was too busy fighting for my life in this godforsaken place.”

  “You were going to ask me something about the stats?” Leila writes.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I wanted to know if you’ve ever felt like your stat device was receiving more energy from the air after a big mage fight had occurred in your vicinity.”

  “Not in particular, no,” Leila writes. “I mean, we just had that big fight with the dragon, yesterday, and neither of us got any stat points.”

  “Yes, exactly!” I say. “But according to the data I’d gathered before coming here, the stat device should not be gathering the energy selectively. And yet, I don’t remember ever getting stat points after participating in a mage battle. Do you know why this might be happening?”

  “I don’t know,” Leila writes. “I haven’t really thought about it that much…”

  “Well, I have a theory,” I say, “but I’m not exactly sure how accurate it is. You see, there was a time when I got to temporarily activate my hidden magical stats, but I only got the option to do it because there was a great amount of magical energy in the air around me at that time. The fact that the makers of the stat device included an option to quickly burn through the available energy makes me think that the energy would have been wasted otherwise, because the device wouldn’t have been able to convert it all into stat points fast enough. Do you understand what I’m getting at?”

  “Yes,” Leila writes. “The energy residue from spells does not stay in the air very long after they’ve been cast. So, if the stat device cannot convert the energy fast enough, and if it does not have enough capacity to store it for later use, this would mean that in reality, most of the energy that the device is getting is not from spells, but from mage auras.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” I say. “But since the device can only extract a very low amount of energy from each person’s aura at a time, this means that what really matters is not how powerful the people are, but how many mages there are within the stat booster’s radius, which, if I’m not mistaken, should be around thirty miles, give or take. There would likely need to be hundreds of mages within the device’s range, for the conversion to stat points to have any noticeable effect. That would sort of explain why the number of points I’ve been receiving have slowed down, lately, because a lot of mages have died since the beginning of this tournament, but it still wouldn’t explain why we’ve been receiving fewer points while we were in the city.”

  “Maybe it’s because there were other people with stat devices gathered in Thilias,” Kate says. “Surely, you couldn’t have been the only person to come up with the idea of bringing one with you to this place. And if you didn’t know that stat devices would be mostly useless to people without lessathi blood running through their veins, then there were likely others like you, who didn’t know that either.”

  “Don’t forget that there were also lessathi in the city,” I say.

  “The lessathi we fought did not have any stat devices with them,” Leila writes. “Even if they were hiding them somewhere, I should have still been able to detect them with the help of my own device. Also, one of those lessathi came to threaten me while I was still in my cell, and he wasn’t carrying a stat device back then either.”

  “A lessathi threatened you?” Kate asks.

  “Yes,” Leila writes. “He was tryi
ng to convince me to hand over my stat booster to him, but I refused to do it. He later ordered the arena owner to confiscate it from me, but the owner decided to not listen to him, because he wanted me to keep my stat device, in order to make the fight more interesting.”

  “I just remembered that there was also something else I wanted to ask about the stat device,” I say. “Leila, you told me that you had level three in speed, but when you were fighting in the arena, you seemed to be moving a lot slower than me, even if we both have the same level. Is your device defective by any chance?”

  “No,” Leila writes. “My father once told me that the physical stats from the device enhance the physical abilities that you already have, and that the more fit you are, physically, the more effect those stats will have on you. Given that I’ve always had a very frail constitution, this is the most I can get out of my stat device, at my current level.”

  “Huh…” I say. “Well, then, I guess that all those months I’ve spent doing physical training in preparation for this tournament were not wasted after all.”

  “You did physical training?” Kate says, shocked. “And this is the result? I bet I could beat you in an arm-wrestling match if I tried hard enough.”

  “I said that I only did it for a few months,” I tell Kate. “And it’s not like that was the only thing that I did during that time. I also needed to do my research. The research that I’m now using to figure out Eiden’s weaknesses so we can finally— hold on a second… Where is Melindra? I could swear that I saw her by the river bank just a minute ago.”

  “Who cares about Melindra?” Kate says.

  “Well, I didn’t see her set up her tent,” I say. “Do you think that she’s not planning to spend the night at our camp?”

  “Melindra can go sleep in the river, for all I care,” Kate says. “It’s not like she’s going to help guard the camp in any way. Which reminds me that I should be preparing to take the first shift. You guys should go get some sleep. Neither of you are scheduled to take any shifts tonight, so you might as well enjoy your rest.”

  We decide to take Kate’s advice, and we each head towards our tents. Once I get inside, I place my notebook in my backpack and I prepare to go to bed. I still have some stuff that I’d want to read, but I can do that in the morning.

  It only takes me about a minute to fall asleep after I put my head on the pillow. I am, however, woken up barely an hour later, by the feeling of a pair of breasts slowly pressing themselves against my chest.

  As I quickly open my eyes to find out what’s going on, I see that Melindra is currently trying to squeeze herself inside my tent, right next to me, but due to the relatively small area available inside, she’s having a bit of trouble fitting in.

  “What the—” I start to say, but I get interrupted by Melindra quickly shushing me, and putting her index finger on my mouth.

  “Shhhh!” Melindra whispers. “You’re going to wake up the others! Hold on, let me cast a silencing spell on the area around us.”

  She then quickly whispers an incantation, and the sound of the crickets that I’ve been hearing until now suddenly stops, along with every other sound that is coming from outside the tent.

  “There!” Melindra says, in a louder voice, with a triumphant look on her face. “Now we can talk normally. Nobody outside the tent should be able to hear us.”

  “What are you doing here?” I ask her, as I slide myself to the opposite end of the tent, in the little space that is available to me. “How did you even get here? Isn’t Kate the one keeping watch right now?”

  “Oh, getting inside unnoticed was easy,” Melindra says. “I just had to cast an invisibility spell, and then I opened and closed the tent at a moment when the ice mage wasn’t looking.”

  “An invisibility spell?” I say. “You mean the one that also masks your aura?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one!” Melindra says. “Eiden is the one who taught it to me.”

  “Okay,” I say. “So I’ve learned how you are here, but you still haven’t told me why you are here. What do you want? And why couldn’t this wait until morning?”

  “Well, you see,” Melindra says, “when I checked the inside of my backpack this evening, I found out, to my dismay, that I’d forgotten to pack a tent before I left Thilias.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I say. “And you couldn’t just ask Daren or Hadrik to loan you a tent?”

  “I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” Melindra says, “but I haven’t really been getting along very well with most of the members of your group since we left the city.”

  “And your solution was to come and wake me up in the middle of the night?” I say.

  “I wasn’t trying to wake you up!” Melindra says, frustrated. “Your tent is just so damn small! I only wanted to sleep inside your tent for a few hours, and to get out before you woke up. Hell, I even tried to sleep outside for a while, but there were just so many bugs trying to crawl on me, and the only protection spells I have that work while I sleep aren’t made to guard me against insects!”

  “But why my tent?” I say. “Why not Flower’s? Or Kate’s?”

  “Because I couldn’t stand sleeping next to Arraka for more than two seconds,” Melindra says. “And your girlfriend hates my guts.”

  “Kate is not my girlfriend,” I say, simply.

  “She may as well be, judging by that ice cold look she gave me when I grabbed you by the arm,” Melindra says.

  “Is that what you’re basing your assumption on?” I say. “Kate gives ice cold looks to everyone. Except maybe Leila.”

  “If you’re under the impression that the ice mage doesn’t have any feelings for you, whatsoever, then you are clearly in denial.”

  “Listen,” I say. “Kate has lived most of her adult life in the wilderness, fighting for her life. The only contact she’s had with humans for the past ten years was either banshee hunters trying to kill her, or regular people running away from her, scared for their lives. She probably doesn’t even know what feelings are, anymore. Kate didn’t come here to have fun, and neither did I. She came here to look for her friend, and I came here to fight in a deadly tournament, in the hopes of achieving an impossible dream. Whatever it is you are seeing, it’s not there.”

  “Well, whatever helps you sleep at night!” Melindra says. “And speaking of sleeping, I think I’m ready to hit the sack. If you need anything else from me, just whistle. Nighty-night!”

  “Are you serious?” I tell Melindra, as I see her laying her head on the tent’s floor, and closing her eyes. “You can’t sleep here!”

  “How about this, then?” Melindra says, as she opens her eyes and looks at me again. “If you let me sleep in your tent tonight, I promise that I will forget all about that tickling incident from this morning!”

  “Really?” I say. “You’re going to bring that up now?”

  “Why not?” Melindra says. “It seemed like the most opportune moment.”

  “Get out,” I say. “Go sleep with Flower, go sleep with the bugs, I don’t care.”

  “You’re not seriously going to kick me out of your tent, are you?” Melindra says, this time in a more serious tone. “I’m only asking for a few hours of uninterrupted sleep. I’m not going to bother you. I’ll wake up long before anyone gets out of their tent, and I will do my best to get out undetected. It will be as if I was never here.”

  “Actually, I think I have another idea,” I say, after spending a few seconds to consider her words.

  I then struggle to crawl over her on all fours, in order to reach the entrance of the tent.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” Melindra says, as I accidentally hit her chin with one of my elbows. “Cut it out!”

  “I’m going to let you sleep in here for a few hours, while I’ll be joining Kate on her night shift,” I say.

  “Wait… what?” Melindra says. “No, hold on! There’s no need for you to leave your own—”

  “After the first shift is done
,” I interrupt her, “I’ll see if I can convince Hadrik or Daren to lend you a tent, since I’m pretty sure that they’re the ones who will be taking the next shift. I’ll come wake you up when your new tent is ready.”

  I then open the tent’s zipper, and I begin to crawl outside.

  “Wait, listen to me!” Melindra says. “You don’t have to—”

  “Good night, Melindra,” I tell her, once I’m outside the tent, and then I close the zipper.

  Chapter 9

  “Barry?” Kate says, as she sees me head towards her. “What are you doing? Didn’t you go to sleep?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t sleep,” I say. “So I decided to go for a little night stroll, to get some fresh air.”

  “Why couldn’t you sleep?” Kate says.

  “Because I got a visitor in the middle of the night,” I say. “And it was getting a little too crowded in there for my liking.”

  “A visitor?” Kate asks, shocked. “But how is that possible? I was keeping watch the whole time! Nobody even came close to your tent.”

  “Remember that spell that Eiden keeps using to mask his presence?” I tell her. “Melindra also knows that spell.”

  “Melindra?” Kate says. “She’s the one that visited you? And she kicked you out of your own tent?”

  “Wait, wait, no, you’ve got it all wrong,” I tell her. “She didn’t kick me out of the tent. I chose to leave by myself.”

  “But why would you do such a thing?” Kate says. “Why not just tell her to get out and be done with her?”

  “Because I didn’t want to kick her out like a dog, when she didn’t have a place to sleep,” I say.

  “No place to sleep?” Kate asks. “What do you mean? Didn’t she bring a tent?”

  “She forgot to pack one,” I say.

  “Is this what it’s all about?” Kate says. “Couldn’t she have just asked Daren or Hadrik for a tent?”

  “She didn’t want to ask them, because she doesn’t get along with them very well,” I say.