Prior to our fight, this room was smooth concrete and steel rebar, unmarred but for the corpses of the cultists and the two dragon-babies.
Now, chunks of concrete end in jagged lines of empty space, blood and flesh and fabric doing much the same. The room has been torn to pieces, exposing the void outside. Some of the holes are large enough to fit me through even if I roll into them spread-eagle, and they’re only expanding.
I’ve barely been awake for three seconds when Sierra’s light-purple form blurs towards me, masked by some skill or another, and then a hand starts dragging me by my hair and I’m moving. I nearly Bloodstep out of my captor’s too-tight grip before I realize who it is.
Sierra keeps running. She’s not actually moving that fast, I realize—while she’s enhancing her speed, it’s another skill that blurs her form.
When she stops, letting go of her deathgrip on my hair, we’re cramped together inside the narrow corridor.
With a start, I realize that I’m not on fire.
“What happened?” I ask her, shaking myself out of my daze.
“You’re going to have to tell me,” she mutters back. “Broken gods, I didn’t think the situation would be this bad. Keep moving.”
“Where’s Adrian?”
“Sent him back already,” Sierra says. She raises a hand, showing me a bloodstained piece of crimson cloth. “I received what I needed. We are not strong enough to keep this fragment alive on our own.”
Crazed laughing echoes through the room behind us, followed by a harsh hiss of flame.
“We need to keep moving,” Sierra says. “Can you walk?”
“I leveled up,” I tell her. “I can move.”
“Congratulations,” she said. “For your own good, please keep up.”
With that, she throws a bright-purple sphere backwards. It balloons into a wall of magical energy, blocking off the only entrance behind us. From the look of the cracks spreading through the tunnel and the spell, darker than even the lightless corridor, that skill isn’t going to hold for long.
“Follow me,” Sierra says, and the two of us take off.
We find Adrian waiting for us at the other end of the previous room. Earlier, this place was already a mess, half-separated and breaking off into the emptiness of the void. Now that someone—probably whoever that laugh came from—has started shaking the foundations of this place, this is less of a dissolving bridge and more of a ruin.
There’s only a few chunks of land left, a half-dozen oddly-shaped brick islands floating haphazardly in the ocean of the void at varying positions. The shortest distance between two of the islands is nearly twenty feet. The Warrior waits on the other end, having already made his way across. His eyes widen when he sees me.
“Mind your step,” I tell Sierra, attempting a joke. She doesn’t need to, of course—she’s already started up the same hover skill that she demonstrated before.
For my part, though, I don’t have a single ability that allows me to fly. As a matter of fact, the new ability I just gained is esoteric in a way that I would much like to explore more, but from the way the entire world around me is creaking like a poorly-built house in a hurricane, I don’t have the time to sit around and think.
I get a running start, launching myself upwards onto a mattress-sized patch of bricks that might’ve been a wall at one point. I nick my freshly-healed legs on the sharp edge of it as I make my way on, but it’s just a scratch. For the next jump, I use Bloodstep. It takes me two more uses of the skill to make my way to the other two.
Bloodstep advanced to level 8!
“How are you alive?” Adrian asks me, looking up and down.
Sierra shoves him forth before we can answer. “Go!”
She makes good on her own advice. The Blue Mage is truly impressive—I don’t know what skills she has, but she’s demonstrated a vast array of them that she can just casually use. On top of that, she can apparently run faster than me when she puts her mind to it.
I am rather grateful that I didn’t wind up with her as an enemy.
Tracing our steps back is much easier than finding this area in the first place. It helps that Sierra is an unerring navigator, traveling through the rapidly-cooling tunnels as if she was born to them.
The area around us starts to rumble in earnest less than thirty seconds after we’ve left the dragon-rooms behind, and I chance a glance behind to see that the black void-cracks are propagating through walls and floors alike.
“What happened?” I ask Adrian, easily keeping pace with him.
“What happened to you?” he replies, huffing out a hard breath as he sprints as fast as his frail low-level human body can go.
“I’d like to know that myself,” I say.
“There’s high-levels in there,” Sierra says, having apparently overheard us. “Now hurry. Explanation when we get out.”
She speeds up, and I increase my own pace to follow.
When Adrian starts to flag behind, the intense sprint wearing on him, I take pity on him and use Phantom Shape, creating extra limbs out of my back. Since I don’t have to physically exert the effort that my phantom limbs use, I’m able to pick him up with only a little hassle. He yelps as I do, but he accepts it soon enough.
As we continue, so does the spread of the void. By the time we reach the staircase we came in from, Sierra’s insistence on speed makes a lot more sense. I have to watch my steps, careful to avoid plunging a foot into a newly-opened patch of void.
“Same deal as before,” Sierra says, unblurring herself and slowing to a stop just under the base of the stairs. “Keep your eyes closed. No detection magic.”
I screw my eyes shut and start sprinting upwards, taking the steps three at a time. Sierra takes them with me, and Adrian isn’t far behind once I let him down from my limbs.
The sense of overwhelming pressure that the void imparts hasn’t changed at all. If anything, it grows more intense while we traverse the staircase. More than once, I put my foot into a space that should exist but doesn’t. Although I’m terribly tempted to open my eyes to determine what is safe to step on, the lessons I learned coming down remind me not to.
It takes us five minutes to get out, but they might as well be five hundred. When we’re almost out, I hear a truly incredible crash behind me, as if a building a mile tall just fell in on itself, but I keep my eyes shut and my steps quick.
Reaching the surface at long last is a relief in more ways than one. I didn’t expect to face opponents this powerful going in. From the looks of it, neither did my two compatriots.
I have a dozen questions about to spill out, and I assume the others do too, but Sierra stops short as the adrenaline fades from our systems and we step into the daylight of the alleyway we entered through. Adrian looks askance at her, then me, and then he turns beet red, tearing his eyes away.
“Evelyn,” Sierra says. “We should get you some proper clothes.”
Right. Everything I was wearing is a char now. The wraithfire was hot enough to melt steel, and so my remaining clothing is stuck to me as nothing more than particularly thick ash.
The fire did not, I notice, burn away the blood. There’s quite a bit of it, and I’m not sure how much of it is mine.
I cover myself with a hasty Shape Blood for the time being, though Sierra insists on getting me another set of proper clothes. This time, she leads us into another inn less than a minute from our location—a somewhat run-down one named the Last Light Inn—and pays with a gold piece that she retrieves from thin air, which is more than enough to break past any resistnace the innkeeper might’ve held.
Sierra disappears for about five minutes after that, then returns with a basic shift and leggings for me. I accept them gratefully.
When we’re all sorted out, the three of us finally settle into one room, Sierra sitting on a room while Adrian lounges on a couch and I stand.
“What did you see—“
“How are you alive—“
“When did the wraithfire disappear—“
Adrian holds a hand up, forestalling the questions that each of us ask simultaneously. “One question at a time. Evelyn, you first.”
I nod at him thankfully. “Sierra, you said they were tearing the fragment down. I would like to know who, how, and why.”
“The who is simple,” she replies. “Demon cultists. I don’t know which sect they belong to, but their goals are all similar.”
“More enemies,” I say. “Fantastic.”
“Strong enemies,” Sierra replies. “They have hard and soft power aplenty. They have access to every fragment I know of and more. Bringing even a branch of one down is a task for an organization, not the three of us.”
“If you get tangled up in their shit, make sure to end them,” Adrian adds. “If you ruin their plans and one of them lives, he’ll come back with a vengeance.”
“A particularly nasty branch of the Seventh Sect is what sent us fleeing back to the Crowned Islands,” Sierra says. Adrian gives her a meaningful look. “Oh, sorry, Adrian.”
She’s not very good at hiding her secrets, is she?
“Anyway,” the Blue Mage continues, making a face like she’s just bitten into something sour, “they have powerful magic, which is how they either found another entrance into this fragment or made their own. I’ll have to… ugh, I must report this.
“That’s the how. As to the why: the reasoning behind their actions is simple. Though the cults differ in their methodologies and beliefs, they all want the same thing.”
“And that is?”
“Demonic ascension,” she says.
“Descent, depending on who you listen to,” Adrian interjects. “It’s got something to do with the demonic plane, which is a world away from us.”
“I’m surprised you don’t know more of this,” Sierra says.
“Sierra, you of all people should know what being here means,” Adrian says, gesturing at the area around him. “Big city or not, these islands are in the dark ages magically.”
She sighs. “You’re right. Sorry, Evelyn, it’s rude of me to presume.”
I couldn’t care less about the presumption. “What’s the world like outside of the Crowned Islands?”
Thanks to Sapphire, I already know that the nation I’m in is largely considered a backwater. For me to truly advance, to reach the peak of what I can be, I need to grow past the walls I find myself in. Whether that’s the lab, Outpost 17, the Crowned Islands, or the entire world, I’ll surpass it all.
“Wider than you could ever imagine,” Sierra says. “So many places, so many people. Continents so wide you’d think they were worlds, demigods warring with Diamond and Tourmaline skills like they’re Bronzes, monsters large and small, and a hundred thousand million ways to live.”
“It’s pretty fucking big,” Adrian summarizes. “Can we talk about what we’re going to do next, now?”
“Contact the relevant authorities,” Sierra sighs. “I didn’t know that the local cult had its roots in deep enough to do this. If I didn’t know, then neither did the people here.”
“Is that really all we can do?” Adrian asks, fingers nervously fiddling with his belt. “I need—gods, I want a smoke. I need to get stronger.”
Come to think of it, he’s not particularly high-level, even for this place. I wonder where his strength is. Given how both of them disdain the Crowned Islands, he can’t be a true weakling, but I’ve yet to see what else he can do.
“Of course not,” Sierra says, the corners of her lips quirking upwards. “As soon as we talk to the guards, we’ll finish cleaning up the dragonspawn and eliminate every cultist in our way.”
“Now that,” Adrian says, “is something I can get behind.”
Sierra pauses, staring off into empty space. The half-smile drops from her lips.
“It’ll have to wait,” the Blue Mage says, falling back onto the bed with a sigh. “Fucking Aunt Marie… sorry, a lady should use proper language. Fuck!”
“She send you a message?” Adrian asks.
Sierra throws her arms up where she’s laying, giving off the impression of a petulant child. “She did. Marie just can’t leave me alone. ‘The situation has changed,’ she says. She’s telling me to stay still while they send personnel in. Apparently, there’s other demonic influence in the city, and she doesn’t think I can handle it.”
Other demonic influence… Marie is a UCC researcher. If my dream-vision was correct, she’s one of Sapphire’s. She worked on the demonic project that spawned the EVs.
Is the message about me?
“So what do we need to do?” I ask.
“Nothing, essentially,” Sierra grumps, sitting up. “She wants us to avoid the fragments while she sends people there, and Aunt Marie always knows if I enter one.”
“A break can’t hurt,” Adrian says gently. “Gods know that Evelyn needs one.”
He gestures towards me, and I tilt my head in confusion. I feel much better now. The frigid emptiness within me is duller now, pushed aside by my new trait. Examining it in more depth doesn’t reveal any of its secrets, but I can assume that Soulless allows me to survive with the amount of soul damage I had. While the sensation is uncomfortable, it’s nothing like the crushing emptiness it was before.
The Blue Mage looks at me—takes a good, proper look at me—and nods. “You’re right. I apologize. I should not be pushing you in this state.”
“What state?” I ask against my better judgment.
Sierra reaches behind her, her arm glowing light blue, and she retrieves a hand mirror from a space I can’t identify. She hands it to me, and I stare into my reflection.
The woman in the mirror looks hollow. My red irises have expanded, and what was a cold stare before now simply appears empty, emotionless. Devoid of life. I feel the now-familiar weight of the void settle upon me just from looking at myself.
“Well,” Adrian says, awkwardly breaking the silence. “I’d like to grab a drink. Maybe Evelyn can join us?”
“Of course you’d want to drink,” Sierra snorts. “For once, I agree. We could get some liquor into you, Evelyn. What do you think about that?”
“I’d like to continue chasing after them,” I say, then reconsider. If the UCC is moving in, it’s probably best to keep my head down. If Marie, someone who isn’t from the Crowned Islands, is getting involved, there’s a chance she brings people stronger than I can handle. “It would be nice to have a meal, though.”
“That settles it, then,” Sierra says. “Adrian, you must’ve seen every tavern in the city. Find us a good one.”
He puts a hand to his chest, taking mock offense. “Please. At most, I’ve been to eighty percent of them. At most.”
“Show us a good one, then,” Sierra says, laughing lightly. “Don’t worry, Evelyn, we’ll find you something more suitable to wear.”
I don’t particularly care about getting better clothes, but I shrug and accept the proposition anyway. For now, having allies has been helpful, and increasing bonds with them will allow me to retain them.
We set off from the Last Light—Sierra apparently doesn’t care that she spent what looks to be an absurd amount of money for roughly fifteen minutes of room usage—and this time, it’s Adrian that leads the path.
While he’s not as used to navigating the city as Sierra obviously is, he does manage to get us to our destination. Twice, he accidentally leads us into dead-end alleyways where shadowy figures lurk, but nobody bothers us when we’re there and he keeps us going.
Eventually, we find our way to a cozy-looking establishment with The Golden Chalice stenciled onto a stone sign. The gold-and-black styling of the tavern is much cleaner and more professional than most of the other ones we’ve passed by.
“We can get a private room or just eat and drink in the common table,” Adrian says, gesturing. “There’s usually less of the distasteful folk here.”
“Sounds good,” I say.
I really want to sit and try to find the effects of my new Soulless trait. If there’s a way for me to fix the soul damage, I need to find that. I think that the soul damage might be why I didn’t get any new skills this level, and that’s unacceptable.
Sierra greets the man at the entrance with practiced ease. This time, she doesn’t even need to pay before he lets us through. Before we step in, I use Disguise Self, smoothing over the hollow look in my eyes.
As we enter the dimly-lit central room of the tavern, already half-full despite the relatively early hour, Adrian stops in his tracks.
“Sierra,” he hisses, pointing at a man drinking alone at the bar. “Look.”
Sierra looks, and so do I. The lone drinker is clad in an expensive-looking brown coat. One of his shoulders has a dark red symbol emblazoned on it.
The Blue Mage has a less visible reaction, but I can see her shoulders tense. “That’s—alright, find us another tavern.”
I have no idea who the man is, but if my two companions want to leave, I’m fine with going too. I do Appraise him, at least.
Name: Austin Raven
Age: 33
Race: Human
Class: Brawler
Level: 14
Last Used Skill: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Level 14. I think that’s probably around the edge of what I can take on in a fight, but he looks inebriated. If it comes down to it, I should be able to take him.
We’ve barely taken a step back when he turns to look at me.
“Shit,” Adrian says. “Do we leave?”
“You know what’ll happen,” Sierra whispers back. “We can’t. Raven punishes cowardice.”
Watery brown eyes look deep into mine, and he flashes me a smile that makes my skin crawl.
“Yoooouuu,” he slurs, raising a shaky finger and pointing straight at my chest. “Come drink with me.”
I run through a dozen possibilities in my mind, then decide on one. Sierra and Adrian seem to fear this man. They shouldn’t mind too much if I kill him.
I walk forward, smiling back. I hope none of the hungry venom shows through.
“I’d love to,” I say, drawing on Acting.
Austin doesn’t know what’s coming for him.
Prior to our fight, this room was smooth concrete and steel rebar, unmarred but for the corpses of the cultists and the two dragon-babies.
Now, chunks of concrete end in jagged lines of empty space, blood and flesh and fabric doing much the same. The room has been torn to pieces, exposing the void outside. Some of the holes are large enough to fit me through even if I roll into them spread-eagle, and they’re only expanding.
I’ve barely been awake for three seconds when Sierra’s light-purple form blurs towards me, masked by some skill or another, and then a hand starts dragging me by my hair and I’m moving. I nearly Bloodstep out of my captor’s too-tight grip before I realize who it is.
Sierra keeps running. She’s not actually moving that fast, I realize—while she’s enhancing her speed, it’s another skill that blurs her form.
When she stops, letting go of her deathgrip on my hair, we’re cramped together inside the narrow corridor.
With a start, I realize that I’m not on fire.
“What happened?” I ask her, shaking myself out of my daze.
“You’re going to have to tell me,” she mutters back. “Broken gods, I didn’t think the situation would be this bad. Keep moving.”
“Where’s Adrian?”
“Sent him back already,” Sierra says. She raises a hand, showing me a bloodstained piece of crimson cloth. “I received what I needed. We are not strong enough to keep this fragment alive on our own.”
Crazed laughing echoes through the room behind us, followed by a harsh hiss of flame.
“We need to keep moving,” Sierra says. “Can you walk?”
“I leveled up,” I tell her. “I can move.”
“Congratulations,” she said. “For your own good, please keep up.”
With that, she throws a bright-purple sphere backwards. It balloons into a wall of magical energy, blocking off the only entrance behind us. From the look of the cracks spreading through the tunnel and the spell, darker than even the lightless corridor, that skill isn’t going to hold for long.
“Follow me,” Sierra says, and the two of us take off.
We find Adrian waiting for us at the other end of the previous room. Earlier, this place was already a mess, half-separated and breaking off into the emptiness of the void. Now that someone—probably whoever that laugh came from—has started shaking the foundations of this place, this is less of a dissolving bridge and more of a ruin.
There’s only a few chunks of land left, a half-dozen oddly-shaped brick islands floating haphazardly in the ocean of the void at varying positions. The shortest distance between two of the islands is nearly twenty feet. The Warrior waits on the other end, having already made his way across. His eyes widen when he sees me.
“Mind your step,” I tell Sierra, attempting a joke. She doesn’t need to, of course—she’s already started up the same hover skill that she demonstrated before.
For my part, though, I don’t have a single ability that allows me to fly. As a matter of fact, the new ability I just gained is esoteric in a way that I would much like to explore more, but from the way the entire world around me is creaking like a poorly-built house in a hurricane, I don’t have the time to sit around and think.
I get a running start, launching myself upwards onto a mattress-sized patch of bricks that might’ve been a wall at one point. I nick my freshly-healed legs on the sharp edge of it as I make my way on, but it’s just a scratch. For the next jump, I use Bloodstep. It takes me two more uses of the skill to make my way to the other two.
Bloodstep advanced to level 8!
“How are you alive?” Adrian asks me, looking up and down.
Sierra shoves him forth before we can answer. “Go!”
She makes good on her own advice. The Blue Mage is truly impressive—I don’t know what skills she has, but she’s demonstrated a vast array of them that she can just casually use. On top of that, she can apparently run faster than me when she puts her mind to it.
I am rather grateful that I didn’t wind up with her as an enemy.
Tracing our steps back is much easier than finding this area in the first place. It helps that Sierra is an unerring navigator, traveling through the rapidly-cooling tunnels as if she was born to them.
The area around us starts to rumble in earnest less than thirty seconds after we’ve left the dragon-rooms behind, and I chance a glance behind to see that the black void-cracks are propagating through walls and floors alike.
“What happened?” I ask Adrian, easily keeping pace with him.
“What happened to you?” he replies, huffing out a hard breath as he sprints as fast as his frail low-level human body can go.
“I’d like to know that myself,” I say.
“There’s high-levels in there,” Sierra says, having apparently overheard us. “Now hurry. Explanation when we get out.”
She speeds up, and I increase my own pace to follow.
When Adrian starts to flag behind, the intense sprint wearing on him, I take pity on him and use Phantom Shape, creating extra limbs out of my back. Since I don’t have to physically exert the effort that my phantom limbs use, I’m able to pick him up with only a little hassle. He yelps as I do, but he accepts it soon enough.
As we continue, so does the spread of the void. By the time we reach the staircase we came in from, Sierra’s insistence on speed makes a lot more sense. I have to watch my steps, careful to avoid plunging a foot into a newly-opened patch of void.
“Same deal as before,” Sierra says, unblurring herself and slowing to a stop just under the base of the stairs. “Keep your eyes closed. No detection magic.”
I screw my eyes shut and start sprinting upwards, taking the steps three at a time. Sierra takes them with me, and Adrian isn’t far behind once I let him down from my limbs.
The sense of overwhelming pressure that the void imparts hasn’t changed at all. If anything, it grows more intense while we traverse the staircase. More than once, I put my foot into a space that should exist but doesn’t. Although I’m terribly tempted to open my eyes to determine what is safe to step on, the lessons I learned coming down remind me not to.
It takes us five minutes to get out, but they might as well be five hundred. When we’re almost out, I hear a truly incredible crash behind me, as if a building a mile tall just fell in on itself, but I keep my eyes shut and my steps quick.
Reaching the surface at long last is a relief in more ways than one. I didn’t expect to face opponents this powerful going in. From the looks of it, neither did my two compatriots.
I have a dozen questions about to spill out, and I assume the others do too, but Sierra stops short as the adrenaline fades from our systems and we step into the daylight of the alleyway we entered through. Adrian looks askance at her, then me, and then he turns beet red, tearing his eyes away.
“Evelyn,” Sierra says. “We should get you some proper clothes.”
Right. Everything I was wearing is a char now. The wraithfire was hot enough to melt steel, and so my remaining clothing is stuck to me as nothing more than particularly thick ash.
The fire did not, I notice, burn away the blood. There’s quite a bit of it, and I’m not sure how much of it is mine.
I cover myself with a hasty Shape Blood for the time being, though Sierra insists on getting me another set of proper clothes. This time, she leads us into another inn less than a minute from our location—a somewhat run-down one named the Last Light Inn—and pays with a gold piece that she retrieves from thin air, which is more than enough to break past any resistnace the innkeeper might’ve held.
Sierra disappears for about five minutes after that, then returns with a basic shift and leggings for me. I accept them gratefully.
When we’re all sorted out, the three of us finally settle into one room, Sierra sitting on a room while Adrian lounges on a couch and I stand.
“What did you see—“
“How are you alive—“
“When did the wraithfire disappear—“
Adrian holds a hand up, forestalling the questions that each of us ask simultaneously. “One question at a time. Evelyn, you first.”
I nod at him thankfully. “Sierra, you said they were tearing the fragment down. I would like to know who, how, and why.”
“The who is simple,” she replies. “Demon cultists. I don’t know which sect they belong to, but their goals are all similar.”
“More enemies,” I say. “Fantastic.”
“Strong enemies,” Sierra replies. “They have hard and soft power aplenty. They have access to every fragment I know of and more. Bringing even a branch of one down is a task for an organization, not the three of us.”
“If you get tangled up in their shit, make sure to end them,” Adrian adds. “If you ruin their plans and one of them lives, he’ll come back with a vengeance.”
“A particularly nasty branch of the Seventh Sect is what sent us fleeing back to the Crowned Islands,” Sierra says. Adrian gives her a meaningful look. “Oh, sorry, Adrian.”
She’s not very good at hiding her secrets, is she?
“Anyway,” the Blue Mage continues, making a face like she’s just bitten into something sour, “they have powerful magic, which is how they either found another entrance into this fragment or made their own. I’ll have to… ugh, I must report this.
“That’s the how. As to the why: the reasoning behind their actions is simple. Though the cults differ in their methodologies and beliefs, they all want the same thing.”
“And that is?”
“Demonic ascension,” she says.
“Descent, depending on who you listen to,” Adrian interjects. “It’s got something to do with the demonic plane, which is a world away from us.”
“I’m surprised you don’t know more of this,” Sierra says.
“Sierra, you of all people should know what being here means,” Adrian says, gesturing at the area around him. “Big city or not, these islands are in the dark ages magically.”
She sighs. “You’re right. Sorry, Evelyn, it’s rude of me to presume.”
I couldn’t care less about the presumption. “What’s the world like outside of the Crowned Islands?”
Thanks to Sapphire, I already know that the nation I’m in is largely considered a backwater. For me to truly advance, to reach the peak of what I can be, I need to grow past the walls I find myself in. Whether that’s the lab, Outpost 17, the Crowned Islands, or the entire world, I’ll surpass it all.
“Wider than you could ever imagine,” Sierra says. “So many places, so many people. Continents so wide you’d think they were worlds, demigods warring with Diamond and Tourmaline skills like they’re Bronzes, monsters large and small, and a hundred thousand million ways to live.”
“It’s pretty fucking big,” Adrian summarizes. “Can we talk about what we’re going to do next, now?”
“Contact the relevant authorities,” Sierra sighs. “I didn’t know that the local cult had its roots in deep enough to do this. If I didn’t know, then neither did the people here.”
“Is that really all we can do?” Adrian asks, fingers nervously fiddling with his belt. “I need—gods, I want a smoke. I need to get stronger.”
Come to think of it, he’s not particularly high-level, even for this place. I wonder where his strength is. Given how both of them disdain the Crowned Islands, he can’t be a true weakling, but I’ve yet to see what else he can do.
“Of course not,” Sierra says, the corners of her lips quirking upwards. “As soon as we talk to the guards, we’ll finish cleaning up the dragonspawn and eliminate every cultist in our way.”
“Now that,” Adrian says, “is something I can get behind.”
Sierra pauses, staring off into empty space. The half-smile drops from her lips.
“It’ll have to wait,” the Blue Mage says, falling back onto the bed with a sigh. “Fucking Aunt Marie… sorry, a lady should use proper language. Fuck!”
“She send you a message?” Adrian asks.
Sierra throws her arms up where she’s laying, giving off the impression of a petulant child. “She did. Marie just can’t leave me alone. ‘The situation has changed,’ she says. She’s telling me to stay still while they send personnel in. Apparently, there’s other demonic influence in the city, and she doesn’t think I can handle it.”
Other demonic influence… Marie is a UCC researcher. If my dream-vision was correct, she’s one of Sapphire’s. She worked on the demonic project that spawned the EVs.
Is the message about me?
“So what do we need to do?” I ask.
“Nothing, essentially,” Sierra grumps, sitting up. “She wants us to avoid the fragments while she sends people there, and Aunt Marie always knows if I enter one.”
“A break can’t hurt,” Adrian says gently. “Gods know that Evelyn needs one.”
He gestures towards me, and I tilt my head in confusion. I feel much better now. The frigid emptiness within me is duller now, pushed aside by my new trait. Examining it in more depth doesn’t reveal any of its secrets, but I can assume that Soulless allows me to survive with the amount of soul damage I had. While the sensation is uncomfortable, it’s nothing like the crushing emptiness it was before.
The Blue Mage looks at me—takes a good, proper look at me—and nods. “You’re right. I apologize. I should not be pushing you in this state.”
“What state?” I ask against my better judgment.
Sierra reaches behind her, her arm glowing light blue, and she retrieves a hand mirror from a space I can’t identify. She hands it to me, and I stare into my reflection.
The woman in the mirror looks hollow. My red irises have expanded, and what was a cold stare before now simply appears empty, emotionless. Devoid of life. I feel the now-familiar weight of the void settle upon me just from looking at myself.
“Well,” Adrian says, awkwardly breaking the silence. “I’d like to grab a drink. Maybe Evelyn can join us?”
“Of course you’d want to drink,” Sierra snorts. “For once, I agree. We could get some liquor into you, Evelyn. What do you think about that?”
“I’d like to continue chasing after them,” I say, then reconsider. If the UCC is moving in, it’s probably best to keep my head down. If Marie, someone who isn’t from the Crowned Islands, is getting involved, there’s a chance she brings people stronger than I can handle. “It would be nice to have a meal, though.”
“That settles it, then,” Sierra says. “Adrian, you must’ve seen every tavern in the city. Find us a good one.”
He puts a hand to his chest, taking mock offense. “Please. At most, I’ve been to eighty percent of them. At most.”
“Show us a good one, then,” Sierra says, laughing lightly. “Don’t worry, Evelyn, we’ll find you something more suitable to wear.”
I don’t particularly care about getting better clothes, but I shrug and accept the proposition anyway. For now, having allies has been helpful, and increasing bonds with them will allow me to retain them.
We set off from the Last Light—Sierra apparently doesn’t care that she spent what looks to be an absurd amount of money for roughly fifteen minutes of room usage—and this time, it’s Adrian that leads the path.
While he’s not as used to navigating the city as Sierra obviously is, he does manage to get us to our destination. Twice, he accidentally leads us into dead-end alleyways where shadowy figures lurk, but nobody bothers us when we’re there and he keeps us going.
Eventually, we find our way to a cozy-looking establishment with The Golden Chalice stenciled onto a stone sign. The gold-and-black styling of the tavern is much cleaner and more professional than most of the other ones we’ve passed by.
“We can get a private room or just eat and drink in the common table,” Adrian says, gesturing. “There’s usually less of the distasteful folk here.”
“Sounds good,” I say.
I really want to sit and try to find the effects of my new Soulless trait. If there’s a way for me to fix the soul damage, I need to find that. I think that the soul damage might be why I didn’t get any new skills this level, and that’s unacceptable.
Sierra greets the man at the entrance with practiced ease. This time, she doesn’t even need to pay before he lets us through. Before we step in, I use Disguise Self, smoothing over the hollow look in my eyes.
As we enter the dimly-lit central room of the tavern, already half-full despite the relatively early hour, Adrian stops in his tracks.
“Sierra,” he hisses, pointing at a man drinking alone at the bar. “Look.”
Sierra looks, and so do I. The lone drinker is clad in an expensive-looking brown coat. One of his shoulders has a dark red symbol emblazoned on it.
The Blue Mage has a less visible reaction, but I can see her shoulders tense. “That’s—alright, find us another tavern.”
I have no idea who the man is, but if my two companions want to leave, I’m fine with going too. I do Appraise him, at least.
Name: Austin Raven
Age: 33
Race: Human
Class: Brawler
Level: 14
Last Used Skill: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Level 14. I think that’s probably around the edge of what I can take on in a fight, but he looks inebriated. If it comes down to it, I should be able to take him.
We’ve barely taken a step back when he turns to look at me.
“Shit,” Adrian says. “Do we leave?”
“You know what’ll happen,” Sierra whispers back. “We can’t. Raven punishes cowardice.”
Watery brown eyes look deep into mine, and he flashes me a smile that makes my skin crawl.
“Yoooouuu,” he slurs, raising a shaky finger and pointing straight at my chest. “Come drink with me.”
I run through a dozen possibilities in my mind, then decide on one. Sierra and Adrian seem to fear this man. They shouldn’t mind too much if I kill him.
I walk forward, smiling back. I hope none of the hungry venom shows through.
“I’d love to,” I say, drawing on Acting.
Austin doesn’t know what’s coming for him.
