I took my usual spot on the couch, with Berla and Riala sitting next to me on either side. The things Gallas had told us were important, but I didn’t quite know where to begin, and I hadn’t fully processed them myself yet. While thinking about it, and how I would explain things, I realized that someone was missing.
“Wait, where’s Reurig?” I asked.
I hadn’t seen him since the rituals. Not at the dungeon nor here. Knowing of his existence though, I would’ve expected him to be there, seeing how he was a rather capable fighter.
“He’s searching for Shadi...” Berla said. “Apparently she never went back to the Raising Site, and his agents lost her somewhere along the way. It was a little weird, so we decided he should focus on her, while the majority of Fighters fought in the dungeon.”
“Oh, right... Hayla mentioned something about ‘the healer’ being missing... Did she disappear on purpose?”
“He couldn’t say for sure, but it’s rare for people to escape agents accidentally.”
“Well, it does happen though,” I teased.
I thought back to how she told me about monitoring us before we met. Had she and the other agents done their job right, they would’ve been there that night when Tomar and Riala awakened.
She glanced at me with a frown. “It does happen, but it’s rare. I don’t think we have such a situation here.”
“No, I know. Okay, finding her is important, so I guess we’ll fill him in later. Though I still don’t know where to start.”
“Tell us what you talked to Gallas about!” Riala suggested eagerly.
“Heh, yea, that doesn’t make it easier,” I chuckled. “Alright... you know how Hati’s pack leader knew about someone named Miles, who he called ‘the creator.’ Well...”
Starting with this preface, I detailed what happened at the prison, what Gallas told us, and how it all related. If he was to be believed, I was an architect, who created this world some three thousand odd years ago. It was me who came up with the Callings, the beasts, the dungeons, and the magic—it was all part of my design. I was basically a god of gods.
It sounded absurd as I spoke it out loud, but I had very little doubt about it being true. It just fit too well, and it explained why almost everything here made so much sense to me. Even the fact that I was here in the first place seemed reasonable under this new light. Of course I would’ve wanted to live in this fantasy world I created. Though I had to assume that landing in the mind of a fifteen-year old hadn’t been part of the plan.
I also told them that things had supposedly gone off-track. That I had something else in mind back then, which we were now potentially returning to. Or so was Gallas’ hope, with me being present in Erinn.
Aside from a few questions they asked for a better understanding, the three mostly let me tell my tale, until I reached the part where I stumbled out of the prison and collapsed on the way back to the temple.
With the limited information I had, it wasn’t an overly long story. Though I couldn’t tell whether that made it more or less believable. Scanning the others’ faces, however, they looked less surprised than one might have expected.
“Do you believe him?” Berla asked.
“His behavior suggests that at least he is convinced, and the circumstantial evidence is there, so... Yea. I believe it might be true.”
“Hm...”
She fell into thought for a moment. Despite all my constant observing and theoryzing, I still had difficulties judging her deliberations from her expressions alone.
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
“This doesn’t change anything... does it?”
She hit the nail on the head.
“No, not really,” I laughed lightly.
“Huh? But if you’re a god, you can do amazing things, right?” Riala asked.
“Right now, I’m a human like everybody else. We also don’t even know what an architect would be able to do. Gallas’ hopes for what we will achieve also align with what we were trying to accomplish in the first place. In the immediate future, this information doesn’t give us any special powers, and our plans essentially stay the same. Funnily enough.”
With everything that was happening to and around us, and especially with this revelation, it was hard to believe that nothing had a direct effect on our course of action. If I believed in such things, I might’ve called it predestination.
“And if Tomar and I merged, I guess I didn’t even get anything new from him...” I said with a sad smile.
I felt the mood shift slightly every time I mentioned Tomar, though I wasn’t fully prepared to write him off yet. It was just a gut feeling—wishful thinking—but if we hadn’t actually become one, he might still be somewhere. Berla didn’t agree though.
“You must’ve merged...” she said sorrowfully.
“Why do you say that?”
“The fight against the dungeon boss... That wasn’t you. Or rather, it wasn’t just you. You incorporated Tomar’s style. It was unlike you.”
My eyes widened in realization. The hours I spent in that state felt like a dream. I could recall everything that happened, but it felt surreal. I didn’t even think about how exactly I fought the Kobold King. If I had to say, it did seem like a mix of mine and Tomar’s styles.
“Oh... You’re right... ” Frustration welled up inside me, as that last bit of hope of him still existing slipped away. “Damn it!” I yelled and kicked the coffee table.
“Is Tomar... gone then? Forever?” Riala asked carefully, peering at Berla.
“I’m afraid so,” she responded.
A somber mood fell over us as we came to terms with him being gone for good. I looked down at my hands—his hands. It was unfair. Even in the beginning, when I felt like a prisoner in this boy’s mind, I never wanted to get rid of him. Not once. I wanted my own life, but not at the cost of his. My decisions towards that goal hadn’t always been the best, but we were doing relatively well as of late. And now, after all the crap we went through, I had taken him over after all?
I leaned back with a sigh and stared at the ceiling.
He didn’t even get to leave any messages for the others.
“Did he ever talk about this? The merge?” I asked.
“Once. After Cerus,” Berla said. “He was certain that you were still alive, but he told us that he was worried about you disappearing one day. That he would miss you.”
You were spared that feeling...
Just as the room was at risk of growing silent again, I suddenly felt someone tucking on my sleeve.
“You didn’t tell me about levels yet!” Riala admonished.
“Huh?” I glanced sideways at her.
I expected her to be the saddest among us, having known Tomar the longest, but she was beaming at me as if nothing had happened. It couldn’t be natural.
Berla leaned in from the other side and whispered into my ear, “It’s her way of coping.”
“Yea,” I whispered back.
She was always a bundle of joy and curiosity. Always—no matter what was happening around us. But it had to have an effect on her. She was a child after all. A psychologist would probably say that you should talk her through these feelings, so she didn’t bottle them up or something. But I was the wrong person for that, Berla had been professionally trained to move on, and Hati didn’t even care much when his own pack was slaughtered. What I could do, however, was play along, in the hopes that it would help her a little.
Painting a slight smile on my face, I responded. “Right. Okay, how to explain levels... It’s a number that describes how strong and agile someone is. The stronger you are, the higher the number.”
“Doesn’t level two mean I’m really weak then?” she pouted.
“Heh, yea,” I said with a chuckle. “And I’m at level five. That’s why I laughed earlier. These levels are relatively meaningless to us. As Awakened, we’re bypassing that system. Berla would certainly rank much higher than us. Shoot, I should’ve asked him about you as well.”
“And the gems in the dungeon gate indicate the level,” Berla mused. “She ripped through the beasts with ease. If that’s any indicator, you would have to be at least level twenty, Riala.”
Knowing that she couldn’t be considered a measly level two in reality raised her spirits even more. “That’s better!”
“I know you said the levels don’t tell the whole story,” Berla continued, “but it is a better system than categories, isn’t it? I’ve been thinking about it recently. The moderators look like cat threes, but they are much stronger. Assigning them a number to indicate strength and giving the animal race a name seems like a better approach. And I don’t even know what we would call the kobolds in category terms...”
“I guess so. The categories made sense for the Fighters of Alarna because you simply ranked and named the animals in this area, but that becomes inconvenient if there are many within one category or some of them deviate in power.”
The topic appeared to intrigue her. Furrowing her brows, she thought about it intensively. “How would you assign levels though...”
“I suppose you would look at a beast’s physical abilities and put them into numbers, relative to other known values. I’ll admit, I never thought about it from this angle. Usually you would set these values to specify the strength, not reverse engineer them to learn what they are.”
“Wolves are the most common beasts... I could use them as a baseline... And bears... well, they would rank higher of course... And I know that kobolds are level twenty...”
Tilting my head, I smirked at her from the side. This look on her face was new to me. She wasn’t usually one to fall into deep thought and theorize about something, but it suited her, and I found myself enamored by it.
Realizing that I was staring at her, she eventually looked my way. “Hm? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing at all. Keep going,” I said, grinning.
She three me a suspicious look, but didn’t dig deeper, instead inquiring about my new knowledge. “Speaking of dungeons... Do you know about them because you created them?”
“I think so,” I said, a little disappointed that she changed the topic. “I mean, I don’t know where else that might have come from. And even if Tomar knew that legend about dungeons, I also know new things about mana and Sourcerers. Maybe it got... released once I was alone or something.”
“Sourcerers!?” Riala exclaimed, practically hopping onto my lap. “Do you know how the Calling works now? And what about the new scripts?”
“Yea, I do know how your Calling works now. You are a potential Sourcerer, and becoming one means that your Calling will help you use scripts. It’s much easier, you don’t even have to think about it. You’re also very unlikely to collapse from using too much mana, because you’re not actually using your internal resources.”
“Eh? What then?”
“The mana that is in the air. I assume that’s why the magic system is no longer dormant. With Shadi getting her Calling, the world needed mana, or she couldn’t have done anything.”
Her eyes shined. “Can we use that mana too?”
“No, unfortunately not. It’s an either-or thing. At least as far as I know. They called us living water sources, remember? That’s actually kind of accurate. All living things have mana, our bodies are just producing enough for us to use scripts—just like a water source. Magic users are different. They also have scripts on their bodies, but they gain the ability to use environmental mana through the Calling. It’s a part of them. The flipside is that they can’t freely use mana. Similar to Oryn, they don’t have access to enough raw mana to use custom scripts effectively.”
“Maybe there’s a way! I don’t want to run out of mana anymore...”
“Right... About that,” I said.
I explained that we would have to be more careful from now on. Going to our limits had never been pleasant, but I now knew that it was actually supposed to be very dangerous. Nothing had happened to us yet, but we couldn’t assume that it would stay this way.
“You need to promise me not to go too far if it can be avoided at all. Okay?”
“Kaaay,” she said in a playfully annoyed manner. I knew I could trust her to stick to it.
We went over a few more topics before first Riala and then Berla fell asleep on the couch, listening to me monologuing about the different magic user jobs I knew about now. The topic was rather interesting in my opinion, but they had fought hard inside the dungeon all day while I was fast asleep. They were dead tired. I hadn’t even noticed when Hati dozed off, but he closed his eyes even before Riala.
After noticing that I was talking to myself, I shut up and leaned back again. It was the first time in this world that I was actually all alone with my thoughts. It was also the first time in my life that I didn’t enjoy it.
Okay, sitting here, wide awake, and feeling bad is kind of pointless. Let’s put this body and my new knowledge to good use...
Getting up carefully, I tiptoed towards the door and out of the room.
I took my usual spot on the couch, with Berla and Riala sitting next to me on either side. The things Gallas had told us were important, but I didn’t quite know where to begin, and I hadn’t fully processed them myself yet. While thinking about it, and how I would explain things, I realized that someone was missing.
“Wait, where’s Reurig?” I asked.
I hadn’t seen him since the rituals. Not at the dungeon nor here. Knowing of his existence though, I would’ve expected him to be there, seeing how he was a rather capable fighter.
“He’s searching for Shadi...” Berla said. “Apparently she never went back to the Raising Site, and his agents lost her somewhere along the way. It was a little weird, so we decided he should focus on her, while the majority of Fighters fought in the dungeon.”
“Oh, right... Hayla mentioned something about ‘the healer’ being missing... Did she disappear on purpose?”
“He couldn’t say for sure, but it’s rare for people to escape agents accidentally.”
“Well, it does happen though,” I teased.
I thought back to how she told me about monitoring us before we met. Had she and the other agents done their job right, they would’ve been there that night when Tomar and Riala awakened.
She glanced at me with a frown. “It does happen, but it’s rare. I don’t think we have such a situation here.”
“No, I know. Okay, finding her is important, so I guess we’ll fill him in later. Though I still don’t know where to start.”
“Tell us what you talked to Gallas about!” Riala suggested eagerly.
“Heh, yea, that doesn’t make it easier,” I chuckled. “Alright... you know how Hati’s pack leader knew about someone named Miles, who he called ‘the creator.’ Well...”
Starting with this preface, I detailed what happened at the prison, what Gallas told us, and how it all related. If he was to be believed, I was an architect, who created this world some three thousand odd years ago. It was me who came up with the Callings, the beasts, the dungeons, and the magic—it was all part of my design. I was basically a god of gods.
It sounded absurd as I spoke it out loud, but I had very little doubt about it being true. It just fit too well, and it explained why almost everything here made so much sense to me. Even the fact that I was here in the first place seemed reasonable under this new light. Of course I would’ve wanted to live in this fantasy world I created. Though I had to assume that landing in the mind of a fifteen-year old hadn’t been part of the plan.
I also told them that things had supposedly gone off-track. That I had something else in mind back then, which we were now potentially returning to. Or so was Gallas’ hope, with me being present in Erinn.
Aside from a few questions they asked for a better understanding, the three mostly let me tell my tale, until I reached the part where I stumbled out of the prison and collapsed on the way back to the temple.
With the limited information I had, it wasn’t an overly long story. Though I couldn’t tell whether that made it more or less believable. Scanning the others’ faces, however, they looked less surprised than one might have expected.
“Do you believe him?” Berla asked.
“His behavior suggests that at least he is convinced, and the circumstantial evidence is there, so... Yea. I believe it might be true.”
“Hm...”
She fell into thought for a moment. Despite all my constant observing and theoryzing, I still had difficulties judging her deliberations from her expressions alone.
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
“This doesn’t change anything... does it?”
She hit the nail on the head.
“No, not really,” I laughed lightly.
“Huh? But if you’re a god, you can do amazing things, right?” Riala asked.
“Right now, I’m a human like everybody else. We also don’t even know what an architect would be able to do. Gallas’ hopes for what we will achieve also align with what we were trying to accomplish in the first place. In the immediate future, this information doesn’t give us any special powers, and our plans essentially stay the same. Funnily enough.”
With everything that was happening to and around us, and especially with this revelation, it was hard to believe that nothing had a direct effect on our course of action. If I believed in such things, I might’ve called it predestination.
“And if Tomar and I merged, I guess I didn’t even get anything new from him...” I said with a sad smile.
I felt the mood shift slightly every time I mentioned Tomar, though I wasn’t fully prepared to write him off yet. It was just a gut feeling—wishful thinking—but if we hadn’t actually become one, he might still be somewhere. Berla didn’t agree though.
“You must’ve merged...” she said sorrowfully.
“Why do you say that?”
“The fight against the dungeon boss... That wasn’t you. Or rather, it wasn’t just you. You incorporated Tomar’s style. It was unlike you.”
My eyes widened in realization. The hours I spent in that state felt like a dream. I could recall everything that happened, but it felt surreal. I didn’t even think about how exactly I fought the Kobold King. If I had to say, it did seem like a mix of mine and Tomar’s styles.
“Oh... You’re right... ” Frustration welled up inside me, as that last bit of hope of him still existing slipped away. “Damn it!” I yelled and kicked the coffee table.
“Is Tomar... gone then? Forever?” Riala asked carefully, peering at Berla.
“I’m afraid so,” she responded.
A somber mood fell over us as we came to terms with him being gone for good. I looked down at my hands—his hands. It was unfair. Even in the beginning, when I felt like a prisoner in this boy’s mind, I never wanted to get rid of him. Not once. I wanted my own life, but not at the cost of his. My decisions towards that goal hadn’t always been the best, but we were doing relatively well as of late. And now, after all the crap we went through, I had taken him over after all?
I leaned back with a sigh and stared at the ceiling.
He didn’t even get to leave any messages for the others.
“Did he ever talk about this? The merge?” I asked.
“Once. After Cerus,” Berla said. “He was certain that you were still alive, but he told us that he was worried about you disappearing one day. That he would miss you.”
You were spared that feeling...
Just as the room was at risk of growing silent again, I suddenly felt someone tucking on my sleeve.
“You didn’t tell me about levels yet!” Riala admonished.
“Huh?” I glanced sideways at her.
I expected her to be the saddest among us, having known Tomar the longest, but she was beaming at me as if nothing had happened. It couldn’t be natural.
Berla leaned in from the other side and whispered into my ear, “It’s her way of coping.”
“Yea,” I whispered back.
She was always a bundle of joy and curiosity. Always—no matter what was happening around us. But it had to have an effect on her. She was a child after all. A psychologist would probably say that you should talk her through these feelings, so she didn’t bottle them up or something. But I was the wrong person for that, Berla had been professionally trained to move on, and Hati didn’t even care much when his own pack was slaughtered. What I could do, however, was play along, in the hopes that it would help her a little.
Painting a slight smile on my face, I responded. “Right. Okay, how to explain levels... It’s a number that describes how strong and agile someone is. The stronger you are, the higher the number.”
“Doesn’t level two mean I’m really weak then?” she pouted.
“Heh, yea,” I said with a chuckle. “And I’m at level five. That’s why I laughed earlier. These levels are relatively meaningless to us. As Awakened, we’re bypassing that system. Berla would certainly rank much higher than us. Shoot, I should’ve asked him about you as well.”
“And the gems in the dungeon gate indicate the level,” Berla mused. “She ripped through the beasts with ease. If that’s any indicator, you would have to be at least level twenty, Riala.”
Knowing that she couldn’t be considered a measly level two in reality raised her spirits even more. “That’s better!”
“I know you said the levels don’t tell the whole story,” Berla continued, “but it is a better system than categories, isn’t it? I’ve been thinking about it recently. The moderators look like cat threes, but they are much stronger. Assigning them a number to indicate strength and giving the animal race a name seems like a better approach. And I don’t even know what we would call the kobolds in category terms...”
“I guess so. The categories made sense for the Fighters of Alarna because you simply ranked and named the animals in this area, but that becomes inconvenient if there are many within one category or some of them deviate in power.”
The topic appeared to intrigue her. Furrowing her brows, she thought about it intensively. “How would you assign levels though...”
“I suppose you would look at a beast’s physical abilities and put them into numbers, relative to other known values. I’ll admit, I never thought about it from this angle. Usually you would set these values to specify the strength, not reverse engineer them to learn what they are.”
“Wolves are the most common beasts... I could use them as a baseline... And bears... well, they would rank higher of course... And I know that kobolds are level twenty...”
Tilting my head, I smirked at her from the side. This look on her face was new to me. She wasn’t usually one to fall into deep thought and theorize about something, but it suited her, and I found myself enamored by it.
Realizing that I was staring at her, she eventually looked my way. “Hm? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing at all. Keep going,” I said, grinning.
She three me a suspicious look, but didn’t dig deeper, instead inquiring about my new knowledge. “Speaking of dungeons... Do you know about them because you created them?”
“I think so,” I said, a little disappointed that she changed the topic. “I mean, I don’t know where else that might have come from. And even if Tomar knew that legend about dungeons, I also know new things about mana and Sourcerers. Maybe it got... released once I was alone or something.”
“Sourcerers!?” Riala exclaimed, practically hopping onto my lap. “Do you know how the Calling works now? And what about the new scripts?”
“Yea, I do know how your Calling works now. You are a potential Sourcerer, and becoming one means that your Calling will help you use scripts. It’s much easier, you don’t even have to think about it. You’re also very unlikely to collapse from using too much mana, because you’re not actually using your internal resources.”
“Eh? What then?”
“The mana that is in the air. I assume that’s why the magic system is no longer dormant. With Shadi getting her Calling, the world needed mana, or she couldn’t have done anything.”
Her eyes shined. “Can we use that mana too?”
“No, unfortunately not. It’s an either-or thing. At least as far as I know. They called us living water sources, remember? That’s actually kind of accurate. All living things have mana, our bodies are just producing enough for us to use scripts—just like a water source. Magic users are different. They also have scripts on their bodies, but they gain the ability to use environmental mana through the Calling. It’s a part of them. The flipside is that they can’t freely use mana. Similar to Oryn, they don’t have access to enough raw mana to use custom scripts effectively.”
“Maybe there’s a way! I don’t want to run out of mana anymore...”
“Right... About that,” I said.
I explained that we would have to be more careful from now on. Going to our limits had never been pleasant, but I now knew that it was actually supposed to be very dangerous. Nothing had happened to us yet, but we couldn’t assume that it would stay this way.
“You need to promise me not to go too far if it can be avoided at all. Okay?”
“Kaaay,” she said in a playfully annoyed manner. I knew I could trust her to stick to it.
We went over a few more topics before first Riala and then Berla fell asleep on the couch, listening to me monologuing about the different magic user jobs I knew about now. The topic was rather interesting in my opinion, but they had fought hard inside the dungeon all day while I was fast asleep. They were dead tired. I hadn’t even noticed when Hati dozed off, but he closed his eyes even before Riala.
After noticing that I was talking to myself, I shut up and leaned back again. It was the first time in this world that I was actually all alone with my thoughts. It was also the first time in my life that I didn’t enjoy it.
Okay, sitting here, wide awake, and feeling bad is kind of pointless. Let’s put this body and my new knowledge to good use...
Getting up carefully, I tiptoed towards the door and out of the room.
