Falling with folded wing.., p.18
Falling with Folded Wings: A LitRPG Progression Fantasy, page 18
“Oh, good question! Yes, there are bigger towns and cities we could travel to, but not easily, and it’s rare. Our world is huge and dangerous. It’s much larger than it was before the System came here, at least that’s what my grandfather tells me.”
“Uh-huh,” Morgan said, taking it in. “Hmm, well, now that you mention it, when our ship arrived near your planet, we thought the sensors were broken because of the size of your planet.”
“Sensors? It sounds like your people are pretty advanced. I didn’t even know one could travel between planets and stars without the System.”
“Well, we had more advanced technology than lanterns and spears, that’s for sure, but we didn’t have any magic or magical items. Wait. Did you say the System allows travel between planets and stars?” Morgan asked.
“Yes! Town Stones can be upgraded to allow travel to other Town or City Stones, even on different worlds. It costs System Credits, though.” Issa frowned and continued, “You can trade treasures like the Energy beads for System Credits at a Town Stone.”
“All right, my head’s spinning. Let’s get walking while I mull these facts over.” Morgan chuckled, and they advanced, armed and clothed and feeling a lot better about their prospects, into the hallway and toward the stairs.
This time the stairwell was a rickety mishmash of wooden planks. The steps were flat and sturdy, but they were cut in all sorts of different sizes, and the railing was of varying heights. The walls were boards and planks that were unevenly matched together, and the gaps in the panels seemed to lead into endless shadow. It was nerve-wracking climbing those steps, and they seemed to go on forever. Their lanterns made islands of light in the dark, creaking stairwell as they climbed. Morgan kept track of the time with his quest tracker. When they started the climb, he was on four out of seven days in his quest to help Issa stay alive.
As they climbed, Morgan and Issa spoke in quiet voices, telling each other about their lives before the Crucible. Issa told Morgan about her father and how she was an only child. She told him about losing her mother to raiders when she was a little girl and how her father had begged her not to enter the lottery to come to the Crucible. According to Issa, less than half the Hunters, the most common class of Energy cultivators among her people, that entered the Crucible ever came back. However, those who did usually returned with significant gains in both personal power and wealth. Issa wanted to be able to stand on her own, and she accepted that the world was dangerous. She wanted to face danger on her terms and not be a victim like her mother had been.
“I lost my parents when I was young, also,” Morgan quietly said after Issa had stopped talking for a while. Issa looked at him, inviting him to continue. “Things were pretty bad on my home world when I was young; lots of wars. Well, most of the media called them ‘conflicts,’ but they were wars. Water was a problem, which is crazy because our world was rich with water. I guess clean freshwater was the problem. We still had lots of water, but not enough was usable to sustain the megacities that started to sprout up in the last century.”
Issa looked a little confused. “Megacities?”
“Yeah, that’s what they called them because they grew to the size of small countries or states. Like the New Detroit Megacity, where my parents were born, was thousands of square miles of concrete.” He saw Issa’s confusion again and clarified: “Uh, concrete is a building material that looks like stone. Anyway, over a hundred million people were living in New Detroit when the Great Lakes conflict started. By the time it was over, everyone was dead or had fled, leaving just a couple hundred thousand scraping by in the rubble. My parents were on the run when some biological agent caught up to their caravan. It was carried on the wind, a kind of poison. This is according to my big sister, who was nine at the time. The caravan didn’t have enough gas masks for everyone, so they gave them to the children and a couple of lucky adults. I was only four, so I don’t remember it, but it really messed up my sister.”
“That sounds horrible, Morgan,” Issa said, reaching out a hand. Morgan took the offered hand in his, and they walked quietly for a while.
“Anyway, things were starting to get better on Earth when I left. I’d been a part of a few conflicts, but it was at the tail end of the global violence. Some breakthroughs in tech allowed us to start cleaning our atmosphere and terraforming some of the other planets and moons nearby. It gave us a purpose other than fighting with each other. That’s why I was on my way here; in fact, I was on a ship full of settlers, hoping to start a new human colony. We didn’t know other people were here already.”
“Is your sister here, also?” Issa asked after they’d walked quietly for a while.
“Oh. No, she died a few years ago. Actually, it’s more than two hundred years now, but it feels like a few years to me,” Morgan said with a sigh. He could see Issa had more questions, but she didn’t ask them, and he didn’t feel like saying any more.
When the tracker said five of seven, they stopped mid-climb and rested. Issa slept first, and Morgan was able to stay awake until she woke on her own. This time, when he slept, she didn’t doze off. Their precautions proved unnecessary, though; nothing happened while they were resting, and after they’d eaten some of their spartan rations, they began the climb again. By the time a small wooden door appeared around the paneled curve of the stairwell, Morgan was on day six of seven in his quest.
As was becoming their usual practice, Issa fell in behind Morgan while he crept up to the door. He placed his ear to the wood and thought he heard the sound of the wind, but nothing else. Morgan studied the door for a crack or hole he could spy through, but it seemed to be too well made for that. He checked the handle and saw that there wasn’t a latch—it looked like the door would swing open if he just pulled it. He gently pulled on the handle, and it didn’t move. He applied more force, and it still didn’t move. “I’m going to have to pull hard. It might make some noise, so be ready,” he whispered. He gripped the wooden handle in two hands and pulled hard, slowly increasing the force. After straining for a few seconds, he felt the door budge just the smallest amount. He took a deep breath and jerked the door. It scraped along the jam about an inch but still wasn’t free. He yanked on it again, and it popped out of the frame, causing him to stumble backward.
Hot air flowed into the stairwell, and dim red light revealed a stone platform beyond the doorway. Morgan gathered himself and carefully crept through the opening. Once again, he found himself in a stone-walled, high ceilinged, natural-looking cavern. The floor was unnaturally flat, though, and just ahead, he could see carved stone steps leading down a slope. Looking down, along the steps, he saw the cavern opened into a larger space. The red glow was coming from that area. He motioned for Issa to follow and softly padded down the stone steps.
When Morgan reached the cavern opening with Issa close behind, he took in his breath at the sight that unfolded in front of him. The opening was about twenty feet across, and looking through it, Morgan could see another cavern that dwarfed any indoor space he had ever seen. The cavern ceiling had to be hundreds of feet in the air, and he could see all the way across to the other end, which must have been more than a kilometer. The entire, massive space was suffused with a red glow from a literal river of red-orange magma that flowed horizontally across the cavern. More steps led down to the bottom of the enormous cavern from where they stood. From there, a cobblestone road traversed the length of the cavern. It crossed the magma river via a stone bridge. It then continued to another set of steps leading up and out the other end of the cavern through an opening like Morgan and Issa were standing in.
“Incredible,” Issa whispered from just behind Morgan.
“Yeah, it is. Who made this road? Are we in some kind of underground kingdom, or did the System just put a piece of an old civilization here, or . . . Bah! There are a million possibilities. I wish the System would just answer my damn questions.” Morgan ground his teeth in frustration, studying the cavern carefully, trying to see if something moved. He could tell Issa was doing the same. After a few minutes of watching the sluggish flow of the magma and seeing nothing else moving, they decided to venture forth.
“This feels like a trap.” Morgan groaned as they set foot on the cobbled roadway. Issa nodded, gripping her rapier and looking around. There were lots of places for something to hide: boulders littered the cavern floor as well as hundreds, maybe thousands, of stalagmites, while long stalactites hung from the vaulted ceiling. “Well, we can’t go back.” Morgan shrugged, and they started walking down the road.
The roadway was similar in width to an old, two-lane road on Earth. The cobbles were irregular in size and rough, but Morgan could imagine that it was a pretty impressive feat of engineering, the way they were mortared together and flush with the stone of the cavern floor. After a few minutes of walking, they came in sight of the bridge that crossed the lava. The road narrowed and smoothly continued up onto the stone support arches. They stopped at the foot of the upward slope and took in the sight of the magma river flowing sluggishly through the cavern. The magma was in some sort of a natural channel or crevasse and was a good fifteen feet down from the edge, but even so, it gave off a very uncomfortable amount of heat. Morgan had been to the Sonoran Desert a few times, and this billowing heat felt similar to how the dry wind would blow off the asphalt in those little desert towns. Issa gestured at the bridge, and Morgan nodded. He was ready to get over this lava and put some distance between him and that heat.
The stone bridge had a gentle arc and narrowed to about ten feet at the apex. It was constructed with rather graceful stone railings, and Morgan realized that concrete and stone were quite different. He wondered if he’d ever seen something actually built from stone before. He was musing about that when they heard the horn. It was a loud, brassy, BAAAAAROOOOO, and it seemed to come from off to their right. Morgan looked over the railing, trying to find the source, when he heard a loud clanking and crash from back the way they had come. An identical sound came from the direction of the other end of the cavern. Standing at the midpoint of the bridge, Morgan could just make out the cavern openings atop their respective sets of stone steps, and he saw that a broad, metal portcullis had somehow been erected in front of each. “Oh fuck.”
MORGAN
I knew this felt like a trap, dammit!” Morgan growled, adjusting his stance and holding his spear in a way that he just “knew” was a ready stance. Issa readied her rapier and looked around warily.
“Well, that was obvious, though,” she said, inadvertently showing her teeth. Seconds later, she pointed toward the rock field through which the road they’d traversed cut. Morgan saw it immediately—dark figures were pouring toward the road, coming, seemingly from nowhere. Morgan could see that they moved in a bipedal gait that was forward-leaning. They carried clubs and sharpened sticks, and some just hoisted large rocks. They appeared to be bereft of clothing and armor, though it wasn’t clear that they needed any, because as they got closer, Morgan could see that they were some kind of lizard men. No, they looked more like salamanders. They had smooth-looking black skin with rough ridges and irregular orange and yellow spots, but they had lizard-like heads and long tongues. Their collective hiss drowned out the sound of the lava flow.
Morgan looked around and realized they were coming from the other side of the bridge as well. “Holy shit, there’s gotta be more than a hundred! They don’t look interested in talking, either!”
“Put your back to mine, Morgan, we have to fight—the System is challenging us, as always.” Issa whipped her rapier back and forth and faced one direction while Morgan leveled his spear and faced the other. As the salamander creatures reached the bridge and started swarming up toward them, Morgan could see that they were smaller than he thought at first, maybe four feet tall, but what they lacked in size, they seemed to make up in intensity and numbers.
“Here they come! Get ready!” Morgan felt adrenaline start to pump through him, and as the hissing, slithering mob crossed the halfway point up the bridge toward him and Issa, he realized he was yelling, stabbing, and swinging the big, razor-sharp spear in a complicated dance. Some of the creatures leading the group coming toward him hesitated and were careened into by the ones behind. It messed up their charge, and Morgan roared again. Just as the battle was nearly upon them, he felt Issa’s hand on his back, and warmth spread through him. His pulse quickened even more, and thoughts narrowed in on the topic at hand—killing. With the Haste spell making him look like a blur, Morgan stabbed into the crowd of salamander men or women; he had no way of telling. He whipped the spear around in slashing arcs and thrusts and brought the haft around to knock the little creatures away. The long, slicing blade of the spear left sprays of blood in its wake, and when Morgan stabbed, he’d often have to kick the corpses off the spear as he hurriedly whipped the haft around to crunch into a skull or ribs.
Issa was like liquid death with her rapier, unleashing days of pent-up fear and aggression on the creatures. She moved with deadly grace, keeping her back to Morgan’s general direction while slashing out and opening wounds on the salamanders with each strike. She may not kill with every strike, but she could move the rapier so quickly that she wasn’t having much trouble keeping the creatures at bay as she slowly piled the wounds on them.
Morgan reveled in the euphoria of battle and victory and was confident that they’d pull through, and that’s when the Haste spell wore off. It felt like he slowed to a crawl, even though he was only crashing back to normal speed. Morgan was suddenly aware of the burning in his lungs and the leaden weight of his limbs. He swung his spear in a wide arc and backed into Issa. He urged her to the edge of the bridge near the railing to reduce the angles from which they could be attacked. With a few seconds of breathing room, he took stock of the situation: his back to the railing, he could see about fifteen salamander corpses to his right, sprawled around the bridge and down the slope, he could see another five or so to his left where Issa had been fighting. There had to be at least thirty or forty more of the creatures closing in a semi-circle around them, glancing warily at their weapons and the corpses of their erstwhile comrades. Panting for breath, he asked, “Haste. Gone. Can you do it again?”
“Not so soon; I’d pass out.” Issa wheezed.
“Alright, watch my flank. I have an idea.” Morgan grunted, then gripped his spear, looking for his next target. The salamanders could only approach them about five at a time without tripping over themselves, and Morgan and Issa seemed to be able to feint with enough of a credible threat to keep them at bay. Morgan waited for one of the braver ones to lunge with its pointed wooden spear. He used his spear to push down on the other’s spear, twirling and flicking it up and to the side, then he stepped inside its reach to grab the tacky skin of its shoulder with his left hand. As soon as Morgan had a grip, he concentrated on his Energy Drain skill and pulled. He could sense Issa behind him and to the left, fighting to keep the salamanders at bay. As soon as he felt the energy coming out of the salamander, he redoubled his efforts, willing his Vortex Core to spin faster and pull harder. He felt a torrent of Energy flood into him, and he immediately felt his exhaustion ebb. As soon as the Energy stopped coming, he dropped the lifeless, gray salamander to the ground. With wide eyes, he realized he was about to be gored by another spear-wielding salamander, and another one was pounding on his back with a club.
His vigor renewed, Morgan dodged aside from the stab and swung the haft of his spear around to crack the skull of the little club-wielding salamander. He launched into another deadly dance with his spear, killing several more salamanders and wounding just as many. When Morgan thought about his Energy Drain skill, he could feel a sense of whether it was ready or not, and when it felt like he could use it again, he did so, grabbing a salamander by the arm and pulling the Energy out of it. After he’d repeated this three times, he could see that he was having a demoralizing effect on the salamanders. They were more reluctant to launch attacks, and he found that he could more easily single them out and dominate them with his longer, more deadly spear and his repeatedly refreshed endurance. Issa had to work less hard to keep his flank clear as well; he’d frequently dart in front of her to swing his long spear in a blinding arc, driving the salamanders back.
The salamander bodies were stacking up, and the pale stonework of the bridge was painted with blood and bits of gore. Morgan and Issa fought, and what had seemed a hopeless battle began to turn in their favor. Once the salamanders’ morale began to break, and Morgan had to hunt them out for a conflict, he knew they had won. No longer worried about his flank, he began to rampage after the creatures, chasing them around the top of the bridge, spinning and catching them as they tried to slink around him to make a move at Issa. Eventually, he found himself standing atop the arch of the bridge, leaning on his spear, breathing heavily, and looking fruitlessly for the next opponent. Issa walked over to him, cleaning the blade of her rapier with a piece of leather she’d taken from her dimensional pouch. Morgan could see she had some bruises and a few gashes here and there, but her smile belied her mood; they’d won, and it felt glorious. Suddenly the bridge grew bright, and it took Morgan a minute to realize all of the corpses were gathering a mist of tiny golden motes. The motes coalesced into two churning streams as they flew into him and Issa.
***Congratulations! You have achieved level 10 base human and have 20 attribute points to allocate. Your first Class selection is available to you.***
“We did it, Issa! It was a bit hairy, but we fucking did it.” Morgan laughed and gripped Issa’s shoulder, giving her a little shake. She returned his smile, looking into his eyes. They stayed that way for a minute, and Morgan was about to say something when, BAAAAAAROOOOOO—the horn blew again. “Oh, goddammit!”
***Quest: You have slain the children; now put the mother to rest. Reward: Improved Treasure Box. Penalty for failure: Death. Accept? YES/NO***
