229, 2/2

Darkness slipped away from Erick like the popping of a foggy bubble.

Two sensations happened fast.

The first was the cold; the chill of something solid escaping him, instantly followed by an inner bloating from his core, that threatened core fracture. Erick rarely felt uncomfortable these days, but his core began to leak mana as though it was overfull, and that mana flickered through his body like sparking lightning. That leak didn’t do anything at the moment, except to drain away Erick’s Script-granted mana pool. But it didn’t have to do more than that. Taking away his mana was more than enough of an existential threat to raise his hackles.

Theoretically, Erick could empty himself of all his mana and become, temporarily, a creature with an empty core in his chest. That would cause a whole lot of problems, though, from preventing him from casting anything at all, to making his body weak. Dragons were not mundane creatures, after all; everything about them was magical, and Erick was no exception. Remove that magic, and he was just a person. If enough magic was removed, then Erick would even lose his Constitution and other Script-given Stats, and be locked into this current body.

Erick was almost 100% sure that this dungeon wouldn’t actually disconnect him from the Script, though, so his Wizardly mana production wouldn’t start flooding the place. That had almost happened when he went past the Edge of the Script all those years ago, when he fought Holo…

Erick shivered.

And then Erick instinctively shored up his internal defenses, and the drain stopped; his core-held mana remained inside of him, underneath his [Illusionary Soul]… Hmm. Which he would need to manually cast and keep cast, unless he wanted to be found out as a person with a core. But he could, and would, do that, so that wasn’t too big of a deal… Probably.

The second sensation Erick felt after stepping through the darkness was emptiness of an emotional sort, for Erick found himself at the top of a flat-roof tower, watching over a night-cloaked city that sprawled out at the base of the tower. The sky held few stars, and the city below held even fewer, for the city was dead, and filled with monsters.

This land had been a metropolitan area long ago, but now the spires and close-quarters businesses and apartments were broken here and there, as though they had been shelled for months, or years. Maybe just weeks, though, for war had a way of reducing things to rubble pretty damned fast.

Scorch marks and wild-churned stone walls, as though from mutative [Stoneshape]s, were all hallmarks of that unknown war, not too long ago. The streets and the first floors of every building were fully covered by dark water, too, so much of the destruction was hidden below that darkness. Maybe a river had been diverted into the city, or maybe some Water Mages had called down liquid horrors and flooded the place. Maybe both had happened, for slippery things swam in those waters, almost unseen, save for Erick’s enhanced perceptions.

He had to blink a little bit to focus on the further things out there in the water, for Perception was a Script-granted gift, and it was starting to fail here in this place. Erick estimated that the mana density was about 80% normal, and that his eyesight would become baseline-human further down in the depths. Fortunately, he had made this body rather perfect already, so while he would lose his supernatural senses, his natural ones would remain.

And he already knew that the dungeon had sense-enhancing and body-enhancing capabilities, so he would just need to find those, wherever they might be—

Oh.

That’s not a moon.

Erick looked up at the black sky and saw countless stars, but he also saw something unexpected.

Far, far in the distance, there was a moon that was not a moon; it was green and blue and had a great big chunk missing from the southern half. That exposed core of the world was not a core, either. It was more of a world, located below the surface of the rest of the planet.

Erick suspected it wasn’t a planet at all. But a plane of existence.

Goosebumps raised from his skin as he began to suspect something about this place. This dungeon was already special because it had a Second Script, but it probably also had some intrinsic connection to Atunir’s history, and maybe to other people of the Old Cosmology—

A message appeared, confirming some of Erick’s thoughts.

Welcome to Floor 1, the destroyed city.

This is a city in the drained world of Insten, of the Old Cosmology.

This is a true story, turned into a learning experience.

Insten was always at war with itself and in particular, with Riam, located across the Mana Ocean up there in the sky. Mana might be impossible to destroy but it could certainly be contained; drawn away from one location, and sequestered in another.

In this way, Riam ruled over Insten.

In this time and space, Atunir and her people eventually came to Insten and delivered unto them a grand bounty. They helped Insten overthrow their oppressors and eventually bring Insten itself back from the edge of destruction you see before you. That would not happen for centuries more.

This, here, was at the start of the ever-war; the Emptying.

You are alone in this world.

Everything else will try to kill you, so kill it first.

Seek remnants of power located on this ancient battlefield and make for yourself a weapon with which to fight against The Emptying.

Make some magic, and make your way to the next floor.

“… Ahhh,” Erick said to himself, realizing the depth of Atunir’s commitment to this dungeon. “This is a historical reenactment, based on facts of Atunir’s life back in the Old Cosmology.”

The similarities between ‘the Emptying’ and the mana voids of the New Cosmology… There was something there. Perhaps just coincidence, though. Coincidence enough to build a teaching experience upon? Sure.

It shouldn’t have surprised Erick that there were similarities between the emptiness of the New Cosmology and the vagaries of the mana ocean back in the Old Cosmology. Nor should it have surprised him that there were direct examples that Atunir could draw upon in order to guide her people into making this dungeon.

What did surprise him, though, was that anyone would want to make a dungeon with anything at all approaching the facts of the Sundering, where the mana ocean emptied out into the New Cosmology and almost killed everyone. But then again, this wasn’t the Sundering, this was the Emptying; this place was steeped in the history of the Old Cosmology…

And people (and gods) liked to keep their history, and teach it to others. So this made sense?

The Core of Veird was filled with places that the gods remembered from the Old Cosmology, after all, so this sort of reconstruction was not unheard of. Of the Core, Erick only really visited that peninsula-island kingdom and Wizards’ Tower, and that small village beforehand, but there were hundreds of thousands of places down there in the center of Veird, where the Core hung in the ‘sky’ like a blue world all its own. Millions of places were filled with memories down there.

Of course Atunir would want to see one of her triumphs recorded for all to see, even if it was only in a reenactment in a place just on the other side of Darkness. Erick had no idea how important Insten was to Atunir, but it had to be somewhat important. This story could be apocryphal, but Erick doubted that most severely…

Probably.

The first floor message began to vanish from Erick’s sight, leaving him with an unobstructed view of the dark world ahead.

There were several paths to choose from.

The tower Erick stood upon had been a watchtower (?) in the center of the city, but it had lost all of its top floor in some magical strike that melted the upper floors and the walls all around into a low, wax-like stone obstruction. But the staircase leading down into the guardhouse (?) below still remained. The mana here was kinda thin, so Erick could only mana sense a hundred meters down, but that path, though dark, was rather unobstructed. There were odd holes in the manasphere here and there inside the building, which Erick suspected might be monsters lying in ambush… Could be something else.

Going into the guardhouse was only one option.

The other option was to leap off the tower, onto a slanted roof down below, and then onto the roof of another building across the road. Aside from the ten meter fall to the roof below, the other jumps were a lot more manageable for a ‘baseline’ human; between 2 and 4 meters between roofs.

A few lights held here and there in the gloom of the destroyed city, and Erick might check out those things, whatever they were. Maybe they were ‘angler-fish’ monsters luring people to their deaths, as those types often did; one should never trust a light in a dark place, for it was often a trap.

But traps often contained treasure, so… He’d get to those lights soon enough—

Splashes echoed across the cavernous, empty canals down below. Something long and slithering moved in those depths of stagnant water, dragging a struggling meal down into the dark. That splashing sound passed across the city, and various things in the dark responded. Chitters called out from a decrepit structure that might have been a church, down the road. One of the lights on a roof over there fell off that roof, off the opposite side of the building and did not make a sound; it did not splash down into the water which was surely there.

A few more rooftop-lights vanished here and there, going back into hiding.

Definitely monsters.

Whatever had fallen off that roof had been the size of a boulder, and now that Erick was looking, the roofs of several buildings were missing more than the lights that had been there until that noise had been made.

Erick considered the need for a weapon of some sort, to conserve his mana for emergencies.

Well. This was a watchtower, which meant that the place underneath his feet should be some sort of weapon’s house. There might be some weapons down there, in that dearth of mana sensing.

Putting one foot in front of the other, Erick descended into the partially-melted watchtower.

It was dark down here, but the light of Erick’s cerulean metamond was enough to see the insides of the tower. There had been a massacre here, long ago, and something had made this place a rats nest shortly thereafter, with bones scattered here and there and a pile of partially burned wood and blankets and trash forming something of a bed in one forgotten corner. Whatever had moved in and claimed this place as a home was dead and gone, though; the bones were white and dusty. The air smelled more of mold and water, than of anything living.

Erick spied a rusted mace in the nest.

… It would serve, so Erick went digging and pried the weapon out of the former monster’s bed. The length of steel was still good, and the rust appeared surface-only. Erick instinctively tried to shift his senses and activate his Class Ability of Metal Sense, to truly figure out if the metal was good or not, but the Script was blocked here. All he got for his effort was a wispy bit of white glows tumbling below his skin; ineffectual, yet disturbed enough along its path into the metal to produce broken magic.

He could force the issue through his Domain magic, but… Nah.

Whatever. Erick slapped the mace into his hand a few times, feeling the weight of it, then he gripped it in two hands and swung it like he was hitting a home run. That wasn’t the proper way to wield a mace, but the weapon had good heft and balance. It would serve.

Erick continued down the stairs, further into the dark, his tiny bracelet forming enough light to see—

A head-sized spider right before it detached from the ceiling, to try and face-hugger him.

Whip-crack went the mace. A splatter of green-grey spider guts rained over Erick and the staircase, while the remains of the spider struck a wall and rolled down into the dark below. The spider was very dead.

Its friends were not dead.

“Ah,” Erick said, as the various invisible parts of the mana all around began to make sense. “Spiders in the building; gotta burn it all down.”

Or rather, smash it all down; Erick had no Fire Magics right now.

The spiders screamed as they ran at Erick from odd angles; on the walls, on the ceiling. Five at first, and then twenty. Erick did not relent. Down came the mace, over and over and over. Out went his fist a few times, when the mace wouldn’t have reached the jumping spider fast enough. A quick punch to the face, right at the fangs, earned Erick no injuries at all, and killed a spider each time. He probably could have let the things crawl over him and they wouldn’t have been able to injure him.

But there was no fucking way that he was letting spiders crawl over him.

Spider #37 was the last of them.

Erick did his best not to slip on the slick staircase as he descended into the tower—

He slipped.

He did not fall, though! He instantly righted himself, his heart suddenly pumping hard at the unexpected action. When he was solid, he paused. And then he laughed. He laughed and laughed at the sheer absurdity of it all. When was the last time he had slipped? Not since before he started running his Benevolence full time, and that was years and years ago; two decades, if he counted by subjective time spent in [Hasted Shelter]s.

When Erick stopped laughing, he resumed his walk down the stairs.

He eventually made it to the point in the staircase where water lay below, and an open archway to an office space held to the side. He chose to go to the side room, on the third floor, just to see if he could find anything informative about this place, on this third floor, the first floor above the waterline.

The first thing he found was a tangle of desks and hat racks and a pile of debris, all webbed together with a wide hole in the center, forming a nest. Two large eyes, set into a collection of smaller eyes, turned a little bit blue as the spider eyed Erick, and more specifically his bracelet. The monstrous spider chittered, flexing its fangs; drips of venomous green power collecting on the tips of those weapons.

The spider crawled out of its nest like an accordion expanding, rapidly transforming from human-sized, to orcol-sized. It came at Erick with all of its legs and all of its fangs, trying to attack, grapple, and wrap him in webs, all in one fluid action.

Erick smashed the spider in the face, his mace passing halfway through the creature’s head, sending the monster flying. The spider crashed against its own nest, and the nest held firm. The spider’s construction fared fine in the confrontation. The spider did not. Green-grey ichor pumped out of the beast, onto the ground, and soon, the bleeding ended. It was dead.

Erick looked at his mace. It was bent.

Erick tried to bend it back into shape, but the head broke off and now all he had was a slightly bent length of metal that was too short to do anything with at all.

Well that was fine.

Erick had already mana sensed a good two and maybe three possible replacements inside the spider’s lair. With a few grabs and tugs, Erick pried apart the thick webbing that created the nest, disturbing dozens of small spiders along the way. The smallest ones ran from him, opting to flee the disturbance rather than fight. The hand-sized ones tried to bite, but he shook his hands, and the spiders went flying. With his hands held strong around the top of an ancient desk, Erick heaved the wooden barrier away—

A good hundred spiders scattered—

Oh. Three of the spiders on him were not trying to eat him, actually. Erick watched as several spiders tried to eat his blue metamond. Apparently they could actually do that, too, because the blue light faded a fraction, and two of the spiders grew bigger, pulsing larger like the beating of hearts. Erick slapped them dead, then made sure all the spiders on him were gone.

It took a bit.

Manavores.

Didn’t surprise Erick too much. Shadelings ate rads to keep their core stable, and other monsters did the same. Usually when a monster ‘ate mana’ it was more subtle than a spider sitting on a magical bracelet, consuming mana from that bracelet.

The monsters here were weird. Weren’t they supposed to vanish after being killed, like the slimezards upstairs? None of the spiders he had killed had faded, or turned into mana. What was up with that? Eh. He’d figure it out later, probably.

For now, Erick rooted around for the weapons tangled up deep in the trash heap of the spider’s nest.

Two of the three were like the mace he had procured on the upper floor; a sword and another mace, both rusted to shit, but generally serviceable. The replacement mace would be a good replacement, but the sword should just go back into the pile, for it was a thinner sort of weapon, made more for fencing, perhaps, than for beating up beasts. The sword would break the first time he tried to use it, for sure. It was missing a handle, anyway, and a bare tang made for a bad grip.

The third weapon was different in almost every way.

It was a wrist-thick rod, a meter long. Erick had almost mistaken it for the bar of a cage or a cell, or some similar enclosure. It was not a simple bar, though. It had ridges on one end, for a better grip, and a fist-sized sphere on the other, and the whole thing was an even, iron-grey color, though the exact color was hard to tell in this inadequate light. What set it apart from every other option was its singular-material, and the fact that it was the same color that his metiron bracelet had been, back when the bracelet had been at zero-mana.

“So a baton of some sort. A caster weapon?” Erick asked himself, as he swung the rod around a little… He changed his mind about it being a caster weapon rather quickly. “You’re for melee, for sure.”

Erick went to the body of the large spider and brought the metal rod down on the corpse.

The corpse buckled under the strike, exoskeleton shattering.

… And the weapon bent a little—

Erick shivered as several things happened at once.

His body filled with warmth, and then rapidly faded, a chill setting in as his bracelet drained him dry, and a secondary drain joined the first. The baton. And then Erick’s newest weapon straightened, every single little defect or problem of age vanishing as the metal righted itself to a pristine state. Physically, anyway. It was still pretty damned dull-looking. It looked like soft iron, rather than like the silver shininess of his bracelet.

Finally, some messages appeared, laying out what had just happened to him, but without telling him directly; the tutorial was over, and robust messaging was done.

You have cleared the infested guardhouse!

MP up! +10 mana production per day!

– –

Ashes Woodfield (9 saves remaining)

MP per day: 20

Meta-Irons: 400, 0 in storage

Meta-Diamonds: 1/10, 0 in storage

Bracelet of [Self Rejuvenation], 92/100

Rod of the Guardian (depleted), 7/300

– –

“Rod of the guardian, eh?” Erick hefted the weapon and almost made a rude joke to himself, but he decided not to. “How’s about we look for a way to make you non-depleted…” He paused. “But maybe there’s another concern about being in this dungeon that must be addressed.” He looked himself over, and felt, perhaps, a little bit uncomfortable being dressed in spider-guts muck. Rapidly after he had that thought, a realization came to him. “… Ah. There’s no [Cleanse] down here… Shit.”

He looked down at all the spiders.

“I was really hoping the muck would vanish like the slimezards upstairs.”

But that didn’t seem to be happening.

Erick brushed his hands on his shirt, ensuring that his grip on the rod was good, and played over in his mind all the various ways in which magic was different outside of the Script’s assistance. From [Cleanse], to Healing Magic, to all the other ways…

Erick thought of magic as he splatted a few more hand-sized aggressive spiders on his way toward the guardhouse’s third-story balcony, which had been blasted open by some old explosions, and which looked to be the only way out of this place that wasn’t through eel or snake-infested waters, or whatever those things in the water down there happened to be called. They were probably eels. Erick stepped over webbed rubble, out into the open night, onto a balcony positioned above open waters. It hadn’t always been a balcony over open waters, for there were buildings all around the space, and all buildings to the sides had large windows. Or at least they had had large windows. Now they just had holes where water barely flowed…

It was probably a town square. Erick’s mana sense was a little fuzzy and it would be getting worse soon enough, but below the dark waters, in the center of the space, lay an inactive fountain, while all around the town square lay areas cordoned off by tiles. Each tile-cordoned space looked to be about three meters square. Market stall space? Probably.

Made sense to have the market right next to the guardhouse.

On a lark, Erick cast his mana sense back as far as he could go, to see if this place had any [Witness]able history—

The shadows shifted.

The world flexed as though through a dozen soap bubbles.

Erick felt an unreality settle within his eyesight as his mana sense tripped into the distant past. As some kinda shift began to solidify, Erick felt, almost, as though he were standing beside the ghost of a guard, looking down at a familiar sight that was changed forever by the war—

– – – –

Ashes Woodfield stood upon the balcony outside his office, gazing down at the farmer’s market below.

It wasn’t the marketplace that he was used to seeing. Three years ago, the market here used to be packed with all manner of offerings, and Ashes would have needed to be down there, in the thick of it, ensuring that no damned mages snuck in and tried to pilfer goods or currency from the non-warded vendor stalls. The permanent businesses around here had good wards so they could keep tele-finger mages out of their business, but the Emptying made securing a temporary vendor stall near impossible.

So it was Ashes’ job to keep tabs on the rare mage that came through, and make sure they didn’t step out of line.

His job was almost obsolete these days.

The mages didn’t come to Iben much anymore. Not since Riam deepened the Emptying, calling it a ‘tax’ for all the ‘good they did’. Pah! It was a slow murder, that’s what it was.

Half of the people of Iben had fled over the last two years. Some went to the larger cities that remained on Insten, which was fine, but some people went to Riam in the sky, like the fucking traitors they were—

Ashes sighed, his brief anger at the world rapidly subsumed by a melancholy, and then he almost laughed, for melancholy was yet another symptom of the Emptying. As his emotions evened, he gazed down at the scattered stalls below, and then to the empty spaces between those stalls. Used to be, there were no empty spaces here in the market. Now, everything was turning to shit. As people left his city, the mana went with them, and now… This place would be dead in five years if this didn’t change.

Markie’s wife had given birth to a malformation last week, and she wasn’t the only one to suffer that horror. Markie, Ashes’ oldest friend, had even been talking about leaving after that happened. Markie of all people! Ashes would have counted Markie among the never-leavers, like Ashes, but a malformation in the family changed things.

Some people would always remain here in Iben, and Ashes would be one of them. The never-leavers.

It would be tough, but he could stick it out.

Ashes glanced over the market again and spotted specific problems that he could do nothing about.

From their goods on display, it looked like the Emptying had finally gotten to O’Ley’s farm; they only had whiteroot and leafies, and all of the leafies looked wilted. The O’Leys were only a few kilometers out of town and they should have been fine for another full season of growing, but their farm was failing, too. All the distant farmers were already gone, and the O’Leys would be next. Would they get bought out by Riam, too, once they couldn’t grow shit on their land anymore?

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Once they couldn’t pay their taxes?

Probably.

“How long do we even have left,” Ashes whispered to himself.

He gripped the hilt of his baton and hated that he couldn’t fight Riam; that he couldn’t bash in a skull and end all of the problems of his home. That thought, that feeling, managed to cut all the way through his melancholy, for he had too many thoughts on the resistance to fully categorize most of them.

If the resistance came here, to Iben…

He might join them this time.

… Maybe he might go looking for the resistance in the city, already. The resistance was everywhere, after all. Ashes had purposefully not looked too hard into all that because if he found those lawbreakers then he would have to do something about them, and he didn’t want to do that. The resistance was where the term ‘never leaver’ came from, and Ashes shared more in common with them than with most people, except for when it came to following the law.

But now…

Seeing those wilted leafies on O’Ley’s market stall… That had been the last stalk.

Maybe it was time for him to become a law unto himself.

– – – –

Erick yanked back from the past that wasn’t the past at all.

A moment of panic passed quick enough as he analyzed what had just happened. It was like a [Witness], but stronger. A lot stronger. He had become ‘Ashes Woodfield’, guard and guardian of Iben, the city that lay ruined all around. But it hadn’t been ruined in the vision. It had been on the decline.

Erick could still smell the faint memory of the market on the air; the freshness of the ‘leafies’, which were cabbage, the dirt of the whiteroot, the crispness of apples…

And then that memory faded, and all Erick could smell was spider guts, stagnant water, and decay.

He knew the name of this city now. ‘Iben’, of the world Insten, of the Old Cosmology.

Erick gripped the rod of the guardian and considered ‘Ashes’s decision to go to the resistance. Seemed like a good idea to Erick, too. They probably had magical options for him to plunder, if they didn’t get used in the war itself. Either way, they probably had caches here and there filled with the contraband that should have been in the guardhouse…

Maybe there was still some contraband here, though? Maybe the manavore spiders hadn’t eaten it all?

Erick glanced back at the guardhouse, sending his mana sense into the depths. He looked again at a storage room down below the first floor, down below the water. Something lurked down there in the basement, beyond a large metal door that had been blown apart, where the upper floor had partially caved in. Erick could go rooting around in the contraband room for trinkets, and there was probably something in there…

Erick turned around and went into the guardhouse, to the stairs. He was on the third floor, but a few steps later, and he stood above the waterline on the second floor, a step above where bad things swirled in the murk below. It was not clean water. Desks held tight to the left side of the office space, where the slow flow of the water had pushed them to pile up before a hallway. He would need to go through that hallway to get to a separate stairwell that led down, into a storage area on the first floor, where a lot of different things obscured his mana sense.

Going that way would require him to swim through the water, though, and Erick did not want to do that at all.

Another option held on the far side of the office space, where something had cracked the floor, creating an opening directly above the storage room on the first floor below. Either way, he would have to go swimming, and he’d have to clear away some sort of obstruction. Going through the wooden detritus would likely be physically easier, since getting proper leverage on that crack in the ground would be a problem without having access to his real magic.

But he didn’t want to swim.

Eh. He could go swimming. That was fine.

He was going to get down there, one way or another, but there was a question: Would he be cleaner, or dirtier, if he kept his clothes on?

It’d probably be a wash.

… Erick opted to keep his clothes on.

He stepped into the cold water, sighed as he shivered, and then he stepped down onto the next step, then the next. Soon, water swirled around his stomach and he began to swim a little, wondering when the monsters would come out to eat him.

Didn’t take long.

Leg-thick eels slipped out of their hiding places among the detritus and up from the crack in the ground. Five of them converged on Erick—

The world flashed blue and paused—

The eels froze, but Erick could move just fine—

A part of Erick’s status appeared.

– –

Ashes Woodfield (8 saves remaining)

– –

He had lost another save.

“… The fuck?”