Blessed time 2 coda a li.., p.38
Blessed Time 2: Coda: A LitRPG Adventure, page 38
His eyes opened, but nothing changed. Outside of the pulsing rune that filled the center of Micah’s sight, the rest of the world was nothing but a muted and blurry gray. Somewhere he could hear Jo shouting his name, but she might as well have been an ocean away.
He blinked again, ears ringing. The swooping curls and geometric lines of blue fire still throbbed in his vision, albeit slightly dimmer. Distantly, Micah noticed that his lip was wet, the iron taste of blood on his tongue.
A slim hand grabbed his shoulder, shaking him. Jo’s face was blurry above him, her mouth moving as she shouted something he couldn’t quite make out over the steady tone of tinnitus.
That he could see her was a good sign. The rune was still visible through his watering eyes, but it was fading noticeably. A hopeful sign.
“-cah!” Jo was shouting. She slapped him across the cheek, shaking the cobwebs from his thinking. Micah looked up at her.
Other than a splitting headache and faint ringing in his ears, he was all right. Given that he was worried that his escapades might have blinded him barely ten seconds ago, that was a result Micah was more than happy with.
“Okay.” Jo took a deep calming breath, eyes closed. “Now that you seem to have more or less recovered…
“What in the name of the fucking Sixteen” she growled, eyes snapping open as she grabbed Micah by his lapel and stared down at him, “was that? I could feel you inside me. Usually I’d make some sort of sex joke about that, but just before you collapsed, I saw things. Those fucking daemons bound by chains of fire. Mists sweeping out of a yawning portal in your chest, melting the very fabric of reality round you.
“I’m trying to be calm, Micah.” Her voice cracked, and Micah couldn’t help but notice that the hand holding his shirt was shaking. “But that was absolutely terrifying. I need to know what just happened, and now.”
Micah blinked at her again, mechanically noticing that with her hand on his shirt, Jo’s bare chest was completely visible.
“I…” he began, only to break down coughing. “I was trying to inspect how your blessing worked.”
“Yes,” Jo snapped, “I remember. Still probably the dumbest reason a boy has given for asking me to take off my shirt.”
“Anyway.” Micah shook his head, trying to clear away the cobwebs. “I couldn’t get as close of a view as I wanted, so I tried to move closer. Except, you know, I was already touching you.”
“Which was creepy.” Jo nodded for him to continue.
“Which was creepy,” Micah agreed. “At that point my perception shifted, and I passed directly into your body, and, uh…”
He stopped, suddenly aware of Jo’s gaze. Micah scratched the back of his neck, looking away.
“I guess I touched your soul?” His voice lilted upward, changing what should have been a statement into a question.
“There’s something like a zero percent chance you meant that in a romantic sense, isn’t there?” Jo asked sardonically.
Micah nodded.
“Look.” She crossed her arms in front of her. “I don’t know what you’ve learned hanging out with all of those daemon floozies, but you don’t just touch a girl’s soul without asking. I don’t really have any context for what in the hells that entails, but it sounds like at least a sixth date activity.”
“Sorry.” Micah winced. “It’s just that the runes on your soul were fading. I think you were running low on mana, and it felt like I would lose everything unless I did something drastic. I didn’t expect you to be able to feel what I was doing, and I certainly didn’t expect the backlash.”
“That’s a story I’ve heard before.” Jo rolled her eyes. “Seriously, Micah. Most of the time you’re the most responsible person I know, and I hang out with Drekt so that means something. Then, you just decide to risk your body in some sort of magical experiment off the cuff. It’s not healthy.”
“Can’t really argue.” Micah grunted as he stood up shakily. “You can put your shirt on, by the way. You’ve been giving me a bit of a show.”
She looked down at her chest and back to Micah before snorting, flipping her hair backward, and reaching down to where her shirt had been balled up near her feet.
“I suppose that’s why your nose is bleeding, then?” Jo asked rhetorically. “At least that would be a less worrying reason than ‘I did internal damage to myself tampering with secrets that are meant only for the gods.’”
He just rolled his eyes at her, wiping the blood that had been trickling steadily from his nose since he’d been scarred by the rune with the back of his sleeve.
“Did it work at least?” Jo asked. “I’d hate for us to go through all of that just for the entire experiment to be a failure.”
“Perfectly.” Micah smiled at her. “I wasn’t able to take in the entirety of the rune, but I should be able to replicate your blessing. It’ll take a fair amount of mana and it won’t be anywhere near as good, but it should still make me very hard to notice once I finish the enchantment.
“Wait.” His eyes widened. “I just might…”
Micah stopped talking, instead summoning the Ageless Folio and frantically paging through it, stopping when he reached the page detailing his exploration inside Jo. His finger traced over the page. There were three partial drawings, sketches of the sections of the rune that he could remember.
Still, he’d gotten a good look at the sigils and patterns of Jo’s blessing. After all, it had been branded into his vision for about thirty seconds. That should be more than enough for his Folio to record what Micah had seen.
He grimaced. Jo leaned over his shoulder, reading from the Folio only to chuckle.
Not quite yet, try again later was written on the page in neat cursive font, signed with a large, stylized M.
“Looks like you have to do it the old-fashioned way,” Jo said with a smile. “Experimentation and hard work.”
“It was a bit much to hope for.” Micah slapped the book shut. “But there’s nothing for it but to keep moving. We should probably head out. The Durgh army has gathered most of its strength from the surrounding caves, and I still have a couple dozen enchantments to make if I’m going to have any chance to pull this off.”
“Sounds fun.” Jo pulled her armor on over her shirt. “We should head back into the western tunnels. I spotted the tracks of some pretty big cave lurkers over there. I bet you could use one of them to power a dozen enchantments.”
Micah picked up his spear from where it sat on the ground. Jo was right. There was a time to overthink things, and there was a time to hunt. He could worry about his discoveries later.
54
Infiltration
“We’ve been over this, Jo.” Micah shook his head. “You’d be helpful on the raid, but I’m going to need the rest of the party for the final encounter. There’s no way in hell they’re going to let me just challenge the Khan without proving myself, and right now, I just don’t have the spare mana to fight his lieutenants. That’s going to fall on the rest of you.”
“But I should be there,” Jo hissed, pacing back and forth with short, jerky motions. “The Kingdom probably sent someone senior. Maybe even a knight. You’re going to need my help handling this.”
“I might.” Micah looked past her toward where Westmarch sat like an ugly scar on the horizon, jutting up from the rolling plains. “But we’re out of time and we need the rest of the party. We spent longer than we should crafting consumables. I think you hunted down every monster that was over fifty in a league or two while I gave up sleep to finish the enchantments.
“You saw the Durgh pickets.” Micah grimaced. “We only made it past them because of the Cloak of Tracelessness. I still don’t know why we had to use the last of dad’s best silk for that. I was thinking of making something like the Binding Wraps that I gave to Trevor and instead make an Amulet of Hidden Movements or something.”
“And this is why you can’t be trusted on your own,” Jo replied with a snort, a half-smile playing itself across her face as she shook her head helplessly. “You said yourself that the silk was the highest-tier crafting material we had available. Do you really think a cracked brass amulet that we scavenged from the Durgh ruins is really going to be able to hold an enchantment strong enough to fool a knight?”
“It might,” Micah hedged, trying not to recall the overwhelming auras of power that had rippled off of the senior knights at the Royal Academy. Technically he was right. He could replicate a portion of Jo’s silent movement blessing on a cheaper object. It would just shatter physically in seconds under the stress that a high-level opponent’s senses would put on it.
Jo just glared at him meaningfully.
“I followed your advice in the end.” He shuffled his feet uncomfortably. “It took us all of the temporal energy in the Alpha cave lurker, but it’s almost as good as your blessing.”
“It doesn’t have anywhere near my wit or charm,” Jo replied with a smirk before sighing. “You are right about getting the rest of the party. With the speed the Durgh are moving, we only have a day or two left before they reach Westmarch. Doesn’t mean I have to like it, though.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Micah did his best to sound confident. “I’ll slip in, find out who is leading the invasion, and slip back out. Nothing to worry about.”
“Promise me that you won’t turn this into some sort of huge, apocalyptic magical battle,” Jo replied sternly, a hint of a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.
“I’ll try my hardest,” Micah said with a chuckle. “As much as I like putting on a show, I’ll try to keep things stealthy.”
“And no ‘sudden bouts of inspiration’ during a spell and modifying it.” Jo waggled a finger in his face. “It might have worked out once or twice, but that’s exactly how you end up getting blown into meat chunks. You can’t save the world if you’re sashimi.”
Jo turned and began walking toward where the rest of the party was encamped at the lake.
“Or melting your body and forging a connection with a plane of existence that wants to devour the hells themselves.” Micah shuddered.
She stopped and turned back to Micah, squinting slightly against the afternoon light.
“About that.” Jo shook her head, hair blowing in the evening wind. “I know you’ve talked about what happened in your past timeline, but when you touched my soul, I actually felt flashes of what you went through. Are you sure you’re all right, Micah?”
“Everything’s fine,” he replied, forcing his face into a brave smile.
“I’m not so sure.” She stood with the sun at her back, hair fluttering. “I don’t think I really understood how much you have on your shoulders. You’ve been bottling up so much and only really trusting yourself. Sure, in the last couple of months you’ve opened up to Trevor, Drekt, and I a bit, but I don’t think I understood how much at the end of the day, you saw success and failure riding on your own shoulders. It’s not healthy, Micah.”
“Probably not,” he agreed, heart racing. She was right, but now wasn’t the time to think about it. “We can talk about it later. I’m about to sneak into the bedroom of someone at least ten levels higher than me. I really can’t afford the distractions.”
“Fine.” She turned away from him, her voice disgruntled. “It’s just that with you, there’s never a later. Other than when we first met and were training, it’s always been a matter of you falling from one disaster to another. Think of it like a wound, Micah. You might not have to treat it today, but if you just leave it, it will fester and grow.”
Then she walked away.
Micah watched her go. Maybe she was right. Every one of his plans involved loading himself with stress past his breaking point and simply trying to push through. He had already made a handful of mistakes that could have been fatal to his plan with a slightly different roll of the dice.
If Elaine Clancy hadn’t just assumed he wouldn’t have a countermeasure for her taking control of the Luoca, this run would already be over. Similarly, if the Luoca had attacked him at any point before the ritual that summoned the sturgeon startled it into action, it wouldn’t have even been a contest. The bug monster would simply have ripped him limb from limb before melting his corpse from existence.
The common thread was overconfidence. Overconfidence got him into encounters that were out of his league, and overconfidence on the part of his opponent allowed him to win. Not a terribly comforting thought for a man watching his only support walk away.
He shook his head, turning back to Westmarch. Magelights flared across the walls as the night watch began to assume their posts, preparing for the coming dark. They had to know that the Durgh were on their way. The Kingdom had enough forward scouts out and about that at least one or two would have seen the massive army massing itself for the inevitable retaliation.
Their vigilance wouldn’t make his job any easier, but Micah had a plan of sorts. It wasn’t a terribly complex plan: He would soar as high as he could above the keep with flight and let himself drop down from above the clouds, only using the spell to adjust his flight slightly to ensure that he landed on the tower’s battlements, then slow his speed to a reasonable level at the last second.
Either there would be no alarm and he could sneak into the building unnoticed, or the fortress’s magical defenses would alert those inside that they were being attacked by a flying foe. In all likelihood that would mean that an elite would come to meet him, hopefully the person who had ordered the attack.
The sun finally set, and Micah exhaled, expelling the tension that had been building up inside of him for the last hour or so. He muttered the words to flight, feeling his body lighten as the spell took hold.
Micah soared into the sky, spear clutched in his hands and cape fluttering behind him as the clearing disappeared below. The air rushed past him, steadily growing colder. He knew from his time reading through the Royal Knight’s library that he needed to stop the moment he felt lightheaded. Apparently there was some sort of poorly understood mana field that would knock casters out if they tried to go too high.
He broke through the wispy clouds into the night sky. Mursa's moon hung plainly, a beautiful silver pearl amidst a sea of diamond stars. Micah brought his spear up, tapping it to his chest twice in a salute before pointing it once at the icy beauty of Ankros’ night sky. He nodded at the moon.
Once he’d padded his odds with a little divine flattery, Micah soared toward Westmarch, operating mostly off of instinct and memory. Ten minutes later he stopped, ignoring the clinging frost of the clouds to dip through them and take in the landscape below
Westmarch was nearby, not directly under him but close enough that a course correction would put him where he needed to be. Micah bobbed in and out of the clouds for a minute, staying out of sight as best he could while periodically checking his location.
Then he let himself drop. The night air whistled past him, his cape flapping up into the air and practically strangling him.
He stood still, hands gripping his spear as he stared down at the rapidly approaching roof of the tower. At the last second, he willed himself to slow.
Micah felt his body lurch, but he resisted the magic trying to press him into a crouch. Gently, his toes touched down on the wooden floor of the tower’s roof, stone battlements lit with magelights surrounding him.
For the moment, no one came to investigate. Micah pulled his new cloak tight about himself and activated its enchantments before running toward the wooden hatch that marked the ladder away from the roof. As he ran, Micah couldn’t help but smile as his steps made no sound. Even the wood planks of the floor refused to creak or vibrate under his feet.
“I’m sure it’s just a bird or something.” Micah positioned himself just behind the trap door, spear at the ready as he strained to hear the muffled voice coming from beneath him. “Martin doesn’t want to be disturbed, so I have to deal with it.”
He frowned. There was something familiar about the voice. He couldn’t quite place who the man was, but Micah could swear that he’d heard him before. A different voice responded, too distant to hear.
“Don’t worry about it,” the first man replied. “Durgh can’t fly, and any winged monster in these parts isn’t a proper threat. It’s probably a waste of time, but I can handle whatever’s up there.”
Below him, Micah heard the tromping of booted feet on ladder rungs. He readied his spear, waiting until the noises came closer to activate both of its enchantments.
A fraction of a second in the future, the blurry outline of the hatch raised itself and a man’s head popped out.
“Brenden Thrakos?” Micah’s mouth moved silently, a frown creasing his brow, his body freezing in shock.
Micah’s moment of surprise almost cost him. The trapdoor pushed upward. Brenden’s head pushed itself above floor level. The squire’s eyes locked with his, widening noticeably.
“Who the fuck are—” Micah’s spear ended the conversation. It sprang from his hand in a blur, almost too fast for him to see, punching through Brenden’s head and burying itself in the wood of the roof.
It was almost anticlimactic. Between Micah’s extremely high Body attribute, the spear’s humming vibration, and the element of surprise, his foe didn’t put up a fight. One moment, he stood on the ladder gawking at Micah, and the next, the light was fading from his blood-spattered eyes.
Thrakos, his former tormenter from his time with the Golden Drakes and the Royal Knights, hung limply, his feet twitching twice as the nerves fired randomly.
Micah ripped the weapon from the wood timbers of the tower’s roof, letting Brenden drop to the floor below. A second later he landed on top of the man’s still body.
About ten paces away, another man stood gaping at Micah, a torch in one hand and a mace at his belt. Before he could react, Micah cast air knife twice, one blade of wind hitting him in each thigh.
