New Story -- Chapter 34

Chapter 34

A blood-curdling scream coming from behind him finally snapped Thaden out of his anger-fueled fugue state. Stumbling to a stop, he realized that he had been operating pretty much on autopilot as his feet led him to the Mausoleum of Despair Dungeon, as having traveled to it quite a few times over the last few months, he barely had to pay attention to his route. It helped that he didn’t have to really pay attention to his surroundings, as none of the Undead would attack him at Level 21, let alone at his current Level of 35. Even if they did, he had both of his Fields active,

But now something had managed to pierce through his inattention because it was out of place. Normally, other than the low moans and creepy clicking of the wandering Undead in the dead forest was the only ambient sounds – which were so normal by this point that he blocked them out – the only sounds he heard were his own footsteps, and even those were muted in the slightly foggy environment. He was just glad that the fog he’d seen from the first time he’d been there hadn’t returned, as that had been a nightmare to navigate through; the low fog that appeared now seemed more “normal” in contrast.

Shaking his head at the inane thoughts about fog, Thaden looked behind him to see where the scream had come from, but he didn’t see anything. That wasn’t a surprise, however, because seeing anything past about 100 feet was difficult even in the thin fog, but he scream had sounded fairly close.

Flashes of the last time he had heard the sounds of fighting and screaming inside the dead forest bombarded his mind, and he took off toward where he thought he heard the scream coming from. Even though he didn’t know the source of the noise, the last thing he wanted to do was come across another group of people who had been slaughtered by the Undead.

Another scream of pain echoed throughout the foggy trees, sounding different than the first, and he sped up his search as he homed in on the source. The sounds of meaty *thwacks* reached him, and he sensed himself getting closer by the second. Just as he passed another tree, he reached a slightly open area in the forest, and at the other end of the area was a larger woman – large in respect to her muscled frame, not necessarily weight – who was surrounded by a group of Undead. Even as he registered the words above her, she disappeared under their onslaught, and he found that he couldn’t target her with a heal. There was a cut-off scream – similar to what he’d heard earlier – and he quickly canceled his Major Absorption Field before targeting the area around her with Lesser Healing Circle. Instantly, a yellowish-colored glowing circle lit up the ground around where he had mentally aimed the spell, and he could see the effect it had on the Undead caught within its confines.

But that wasn’t even the best part, as another Lesser Healing Circle, off-center by an inch, appeared and joined the first, absolutely devastating everything within its 20-foot-diameter range. The first Circle did 18 damage per second due to his Stronger Healing Advancement, and with the second Circle appearing because of his chance to double-cast Support spells, that doubled to 36 per second.

It took only 3 seconds for all of the Undead to fall onto the ground, crumbling apart or collapsing in a disgusting heap, but he kept it going for a few more seconds as he ran toward the woman…

…only to stop when he realized she was already dead. Once he was close enough, he discovered that the cut-off scream had been due to her head being ripped off her body as she fell under the deadly ministrations of the Undead. He also learned that he could see her name still, along with the same information he had just discovered.

Rayana (Deceased)

Human

Level 2

Level 2? What were they doing around here? This place is way too dangerous for someone of their Level.

As he stood there looking down at the corpse of the woman, who couldn’t be anything but one of the new Contenders that had just arrived, he glanced around him searching for clues as to why she was there – only to find that she wasn’t alone.

Aki (Deceased)

Human

Level 2

Diallo (Deceased)

Human

Level 2

Sarah (Deceased)

Human

Level 2

It appeared as though a group of four Contenders had somehow wandered into the dead forest for some reason. Even in their current state, he vaguely recognized them from inside the Coalition building, but he couldn’t quite remember why they looked familiar. It wasn’t until he realized that there were three women and what appeared to be an older man that he remembered these three women arguing with the man in the lobby, though that was the extent of his knowledge about them. Their names didn’t look familiar, but that was probably because he hadn’t really looked at any of the new Contenders with any seriousness – other than Mr. Arrogant Chad, who he already planned to avoid in the future.

“I don’t know why you came here, but I can’t just let you die like this on your first day if I can do something about it,” he said out loud, even though he knew they couldn’t hear him. It wouldn’t be like this all the time, as he had no desire to babysit the new Contenders, as he still resolved to stay away from them for the most part so that his secrets weren’t exposed any further than they already were; but for now, since they had wandered into an area that he had almost been considering his since he’d been soloing there for months, he figured he could be nice enough to bring them back.

Swapping out Major Death Ward for Lesser Resurrection, Thaden also canceled his Lesser Aura of Life so that he’d have enough Mana to cast it. Then, looking around at the corpses – which were actually making him a little queasy, since this was the first time he’d seen a dead Human other than himself – he moved away from the carnage and sat with his back against a tree. While he waited for the 10-minute cooldown to tick down for Lesser Resurrection, he pulled out some rations and nibbled on them, finding himself a little hungry but not feeling like eating a lot with the metallic smell of blood and rotting flesh permeating the air.

When the last of the cooldown was ticking down, he put his stuff away in his pack, slung it on his back, and then walked over to the unfortunate party. As he began to look at them again with the intention of casting Lesser Resurrection, something new popped up when he looked at the words above them.

Rayana (Deceased – 169:15 Remaining)

Human

Level 2

Remembering that his Lesser Resurrection spell had a time limit of 180 minutes before it would be too late to bring them back, Thaden deduced that once he slotted in the spell, it gave him a countdown. Handy.

Since the woman he had seen fall was the last, she had the longest to go before she couldn’t be resurrected anymore. While his cooldown ensured that he would be able to bring them all back in time, he still looked at the others to see which one had the least time remaining. The difference between them was literally only 15 seconds between the first and last to fall, which told him that they had been thoroughly overwhelmed and didn’t last long enough to even formulate a plan of escape.

Though the difference wasn’t great between their countdowns, he chose to cast his spell on the one that had fallen first. It was the woman named Sarah who was wearing a green, blood-stained robes with long brown hair tied back in a ponytail high up on her head. He couldn’t see her face very well because it had been carved up along with her throat torn out, likely from one of the Ghoulish Crawlers who had sharp nails at the end of their long fingers.

Casting his Lesser Resurrection spell on her was easy, especially as it no longer had the 60-second casting time that it normally did due to his Instant Gratification. As soon as he moved his hands in the pattern he knew the spell needed to initiate, a bright glow surrounded the corpse, practically blinding him as it resonated through the fog, and he had to look away. When the glow finally faded after about 10 seconds, he looked back to see the woman lying on the ground, her wounds approximately half healed, though any major bleeding seemed to have been stopped. The spell he used on her also made her continue to glow – though much more faintly this time – as Afterglow took effect as it continued to heal her wounds. Her face was still torn up and bloody, as the spell didn’t seem to clean up the still-wet blood from the damage that was inflicted upon her, but he could at least see the rise and fall of her chest, indicating that she was at least breathing and alive.

I did it. I brought someone back from the dead. Even the words above her head no longer say she’s deceased.

A quick cast of Major Mass Healing did the trick to heal her the rest of the way, and within a second the last of her wounds disappeared, still leaving the mess behind. Regardless, she was alive, which was much better than she had been a few seconds before.

Still wasn’t awake yet, however.

As he bent over her, Thaden looked at her face underneath all the blood that was drying upon her skin, noticing that she was quite young, perhaps early 20’s or even late teens. Quite pretty, too, I guess, though it’s kind of hard to judge when more than half her face is decorated with red, sticky blood.

Thaden reached out to wipe some of the blood away, but as soon as his hand was only a few inches away from her cheek, the woman’s eyes opened abruptly and she screamed. Flailing hands hit his Major Repulsion Field and bounced off, hitting her in her face, but she seemed too out of it to notice.

“Hold on, I—” he tried to say, but the next moment a root emerged from the ground and attempted to wrap around his leg, but it too bounced off. Unsure what else she might pull out in her screaming fright, he made sure his Major Absorption Field was active – just before some sort of sickly green light emerged from her hand and was sucked up into his Field. Unfortunately for her, it seemed as though his Bonus Trait that had a chance to reflect some of whatever damage the spell was supposed to do activated, and he could see a much weaker version of the green light surrounding the woman still screaming on the ground.

As if she could somehow sense the attack through her hysterics, a swirling mass of sharp leaves attempted to surround Thaden, but it was blocked entirely by his Field. The same couldn’t be said for her, however, as tiny cuts appeared on her face as if from nowhere, the 5% reflection from his Bonus Trait activating again. None of the attacks seemed overly serious, but just in case she ended up killing herself, the Lifewarden cast Major Regeneration on her. His bright green spell almost completely overshadowed the dark, sickly green of whatever spell had been reflected onto her, and all the cuts on her face disappeared as soon as the first tick of the Regeneration spell kicked in. Since he figured it wouldn’t hurt, he went ahead and cast both Major Cure Physical Ailment and Lesser Cure Mental Affliction on her, hoping to get rid of the aforementioned spell, but it did more than that.

As if he had flipped a switch, her screaming stopped as quickly as it began as soon as Lesser Cure Mental Affliction took effect, and he could see some comprehension slip into her eyes.

Still lying in the dirt, surrounded by drying pools of her own blood, the woman finally focused on Thaden standing over her. “Wha—” she began to say, before she coughed, expelling quite a disgusting chunk of blood out of her throat, causing Thaden to take a step back as it nearly landed nearby. It wasn’t necessarily an attack, so he wasn’t sure if his Fields would prevent it from landing on his robe – and he’d worked fairly hard to keep it as clean as possible over the last few months. He might have been a little vain about his robe, but it was still his first and really only loot that he’d been able to wear.

Huh. Now that I’m a Lifewarden, shouldn’t a robe that says of the Dead not work for me anymore? Or is it just that it’s a robe, and I can wear any robe? I really need to learn the rules of all this stuff… hmm. Perhaps I can learn a little from this woman and her companions? Maybe they’ll be so grateful for bringing them back to life that they can teach me?

But how do I do that without revealing what I don’t want them to know? Just because I resurrected them doesn’t mean that they won’t turn me in at the first opportunity, after all. I know human nature, and while these people might not exemplify the dog-eat-dog world I left behind on Earth, I can’t trust them not to turn on me. But there has to be a way—

Huh. Yes. That might work.

All of those thoughts flashed through his mind as the woman recovered from her coughing fit, spitting up even more clotted blood as she turned on her side and hacked it all up. Thaden turned away from it all, slightly embarrassed for some reason, as he rapidly put together a plan for the upcoming conversation that would inevitably happen as soon as she was able to speak. He was going to have to lie convincingly, which he had never been great at in his life, but his Mentality was working overtime to put together a cognizant story in the back of his mind. He didn’t necessarily want to lie, but for now, it was the safest bet until he knew more about his current situation.

As he watched her recover and even sit up, before glancing around her to see the corpses of her party members, the absolute agony that came over her face as she saw the carnage that the Undead had visited upon them pulled at his heartstrings. He didn’t know her or them, but seeing a fellow Human from Earth suffering such absolute devastation at the sight of her companions made him realize that he’d been a bit disconnected from the whole Contender situation. He’d only been thinking about their arrival in terms of how it could benefit or endanger him, and he had barely even considered what it must be like to arrive on a foreign planet at Level 1 without the same advantages that Thaden had. Granted, their arrival was entirely unlike his own, where he had died multiple times and been eaten by Vogmites, but that didn’t make it any more traumatic.

He had to admit that he was jealous of the fact that they’d been able to go through their “Training”, where they had likely learned about everything there was to know of Tarth, Contenders, and the reason they were all there – while he’d had to live with not knowing any of that and just making his way through however he could. That wasn’t fair to them, as while Thaden had been mishandled by the Assimilation System, it wasn’t their fault. Why shouldn’t he help them where he could? They were his own people, after all.

Fear. That’s what stopped him.

Fear that he would be ridiculed for not knowing the information that they had. Fear of being rejected if he admitted his ignorance. Fear of being taken advantage of when they learned what he could do. And finally, fear that everything he’d accomplished would be taken away if the System took too much notice in how he never seemed to run out of Mana.

He should push away that fear and learn how to—

Nah. I’m not going to do that. There’s too much at stake here for me right now, and I don’t really care for people that much anyway.

So, instead, he decided that he would still help those who needed it where he could, but he wasn’t going to go out of his way and allow them a glimpse at his secrets. And the best way to do that was to ensure they never had a reason to want to screw him over.

“Hello, Sarah. I hope you’re feeling better; I didn’t realize you Contenders were so squishy.”

His words finally pulled her attention away from her dead party members as she focused on him, the stricken look still infecting her blood-soaked face. She honestly looked like one of those horror movie actresses where they had just fallen into a pool of blood.

“Squishy? They’re dead! We were just trying to follow—” she spat out, before she shut her mouth with a snap of her teeth together.

“Follow? Were you following me? Whatever for?” he asked, genuinely curious. If they were looking to try and kill him in order to rob him of his possessions, they were certainly not going to succeed.

“Uh, well, we saw you were a Support Class and we need one for our group. I’m sure you already have a group, but we had to ask anyway; if you weren’t able to help us get through the Vogmite Tunnels, then we were going to ask how you managed to Level all the way to Level 35 in less than a day… but I guess that’s all for nothing now, because I don’t have a party anymore.”

At the mention of his Leveling, he froze for a second, before he asked, “Who else noticed my sudden increase in Level?”

Sarah shrugged. “I don’t know. I doubt very many people did, as most of them were out killing low-Level monsters outside the town. A few of the broken Contenders in the lobby, perhaps? The employees at the Coalition? Not more than that, I believe,” she said offhandedly, her attention drifting back to her slain companions as she spoke.

That’s a relief. It doesn’t sound as if too many people noticed, and I don’t think they told anyone. It seems as though they wanted this information for themselves, for which I don’t blame them.

“Ah. That’s good to hear. Who are these ‘broken’ Contenders you spoke of? And why don’t you just fill your party with another Fighter Class or a Mage if you don’t have a Support?”

His questions made her look up at him again, and her sadness transformed into incredulousness. “How do you not know about the broken? And about our party restrictions?” She paused for a moment. “You really aren’t a Contender, are you?”

“Ha, me? A Contender?” he answered with a little chuckle. “Of course not. I arrived here a while ago as a very small advance wave of Humans transported from Earth, I think to ensure that we would survive the transition – but I’m not a Contender. I must say, I’m curious about the Training that I’ve heard the Charee mention that you went through before your arrival, as I received almost no preparation. I think the System assumed most of us from the advance wave would simply die after we got here in one way or another, so it didn’t bother with teaching us anything. Fortunately, I was able to survive through some unusual and harrowing circumstances, so I’m able to be here today.”

He mentally prided himself on his story, which contained just enough truth and actual circumstances that it wasn’t too hard of a lie to maintain. What he emphasized to her, however, was that he wasn’t a Contender, though he was from Earth; it would be hard to pretend to know about Tarth and have knowledge of Earth at the same time, and it would explain his ignorance. There was still a risk that she or the others might look into his story a little bit more, but this was the best plan he could come up with on short notice that would hopefully protect him and give him some information.

“Really? We all just thought you were a native or something. How did you Level—ah, what’s the use. It doesn’t matter anymore with my entire party… dead. And they’re not coming back like the Training simulations,” she said with a shake of her head, and Thaden could see tears running tracks down her cheeks through the dried blood.

“Unfortunately, the trick I was able to use to increase my Level isn’t compatible with Contenders,” he said as regretfully as he could. “It was a one-time-use item for natives of Tarth that I was able to use once you Contenders arrived, and there are no more even if you could make use of them.” Thaden paused for a second. “But you’re wrong about one thing, Sarah.”

She looked at him in confusion. “Wrong about what?”

“Your party. They won’t be dead for long.”

She sucked in her breath as she leaned away from him. “A-Are you some sort of Necromancer? I have to admit that I suspected as much from those robes.”

My robes? Huh. Yeah, I guess it might look like that.

Thaden chuckled as he shook his head. “No, nothing like that. I’ll resurrect them. How do you think that you’re alive right now?”

The confusion was still there. “What do you mean? Wasn’t I just heavily injured when you found me?”

“No, you were quite dead. As dead as your companions, I’m sorry to say. But now you’re just fine, right?”

She was silent for a few seconds. “You truly mean that? You can bring them back?”

“Of course. I just have to wait for the cooldown and they’ll be good to go.”

For the first time, she actually looked happy and relieved. “Thank you, thank you, thank you! How can we repay you?”

He waved it off. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’m Thaden, by the way.”

“Thaden? It’s not, uh, number three two five—”

“Oh, no, is that still there? It was what was given to us that came before, as we didn’t get ‘names’ for some reason, just a number designation. But you can call me Thaden.”

Smiling for the first time, her white teeth stained red with the blood she had coughed up, the woman said, “I’m Sarah. It’s nice to meet you, Thaden.”