Blessed Time: The Complete Series: (A LitRPG Adventure Box Set), page 97
Despite the damage, Micah could barely make out some runework beneath the seal—far beyond his abilities, but still crude compared to a blessing. Where the gods’ work was elegant, shaping and guiding the soul’s power into a tangible ability, the new runes were sharp and ugly things. Graffiti that damaged and defaced the entity that they were etched on, diminishing rather than multiplying the burning spirit.
He stood up, mouth set in a grim line as he addressed Leeka. “It is a whole lot worse. This isn’t the sort of thing that can happen naturally, and the sorts of beings that can do something like this aren’t to be trifled with, even by me.”
“I notice that you said ‘beings’ rather than people,” Leeka remarked, staring at one of the bodies as the ice-cold flame hovered just above its motionless form. “I’m assuming that your choice of wording was deliberate.”
“Unfortunately,” Micah replied, walking toward the tavern. “To the best of my understanding, I am the most skilled human alive in the type of magic that gave these men powers. I can do maybe a quarter of what you saw them do. The only entity I can think of that’s capable of this is the foe I mentioned when we were traveling to Zattara.”
“I was kinda hoping you were making that up, actually,” Leeka said with a sigh, falling into step behind Micah. “I mean, it would make things a lot easier if there weren’t some sort of apocalyptic warlord breathing down the back of our necks.”
“Daemon,” Micah grunted, pushing the door to the tavern open with the front of his spear. Behind him, the two bodies guttered out, their souls expended and erased by the fires of Elsewhere.
The tavern was empty other than a massive woman tending the bar. She was almost as tall as Leeka and twice as wide, wearing a leather smock that was more stain than material as she washed a glass. The tables and chairs of the common room were pushed to the side, covered in enough dirty dishes and food scraps to make Micah wonder how long the teetering pile of detritus covering them had been amassing.
The bartender didn’t bother to say anything. The second she laid eyes on Micah she threw the heavy glass across the room. He jerked his head to the side, letting it shatter against the doorframe behind him.
A half-second later, he was Flash Stepping out of the way as a gout of green fire erupted from the bartender's hand, carving a fist-sized hole through the old wood of the tavern’s wall. Before Micah could plant his feet, the hair on the back of his neck stood on end and he dove to the bar’s wooden floor, slapping into the wet planks with a hollow thunk.
An arc of green flame sliced through the air just above Micah’s back, sending a chill through his prone body. On the other end of the bar, the wall exploded into ice-covered splinters as the flames slammed into them.
Leeka’s bow twanged, and the bartender snarled. Micah didn’t get a chance to see whether the arrow drew blood, instead focusing his effort on casting explosive thicket.
There was another pulse of cold air as the bartender drew on the power of Elsewhere once again, but before she could release the attack, Micah’s spell grabbed hold of the wooden floor and walls of the bar, twisting them into weapons.
The woman grunted and went silent. Micah rolled to the side and jumped to his feet. The bartender’s body slumped, unmoving and suspended on two dozen spikes of wood that were now growing from every surface around her. Above her, the air burst into icy green flame, silently consuming what remained of her soul.
“What in the hell is going on, Micah?” Leeka asked uncertainly. “These people are supposed to be forgotten, but whatever those fire shields they’re using are, they’ve eaten every arrow I’ve shot at them. A couple hundred of these people—let alone the thousands and thousands of forgotten that are living in these slums—would be enough to pose a credible threat to the city government.”
“I don’t know if Jakint knows what it’s dealing with,” he replied, frowning at the silently burning corpse. “You saw that Pokkan guy the guards were apprehending. If he could use… whatever these powers are, he sure didn’t display that ability. It was almost like he preferred to be captured and imprisoned rather than reveal his new powers to defend himself.”
“Speaking of Pokkan,” Leeka said, glancing around the room with a squint, “I don’t see the man. Maybe he’s upstairs, but he’s certainly not in here for a beer.”
Micah frowned, going down to one knee and pressing his left hand against the bar’s floor. Icy energy thrummed through the wood, triggering his Arcana skill as some sixth sense of his activated. He let out a deep sigh and stood up, shaking his hand to warm it. Whatever was going on, there was enough ritual energy buried beneath the bar to power a dozen war machines or one truly legendary artifact.
“I doubt he’s upstairs,” Micah replied, nodding toward the ground. “There’s something nasty buried down there. Something powerful.”
“I guess it’s time to look for a trapdoor or something, then,” Leeka said unenthusiastically, tipping a toe under a threadbare carpet and pushing it aside to reveal nothing but more rotting planks.
Before Micah could respond, the wail of an organ filled the room, its keening notes making the chairs and tables dance across the room. Energy swelled up from the floor, ice cold and ominous.
A second later it was joined by harps, each pluck accentuated by a burst of power that reached out with spidering fingers and played over the edges of Micah’s soul. He gritted his teeth as chimes joined the cacophony, each one of them like a hammer blow passing straight through his flesh to assault the core of his being.
“No time!” he shouted, screaming to be heard over the noise coming from the bar’s basement. “This isn’t something you can handle, Leeka. I need you to—”
He stopped speaking. Leeka’s eyes were glazed. The organ played another chord, and she began swaying in time to the music even as an unearthly collection of voices started singing. She rocked back and forth to the music’s inhuman crescendos.
Micah kicked her. He could heal broken ribs later, but whatever was happening to Leeka needed to stop. The blow knocked the wind out of her and sent the dazed woman tumbling out of the bar and into the muddy street.
The harps redoubled their efforts. Micah grit his teeth, using every ounce of the Arcana skill to smooth his soul and prevent the icy tendrils of magic that pushed through his flesh from having any loose ends to worry apart.
His mouth began moving, silently reciting the words to vacuum as he tried to pinpoint the source of the music. The chime of the bells assaulted him, causing the room to spin. Something in the magic made his skull vibrate along with the swelling beat.
Vacuum shredded the loose wood of the floor, opening a yawning chasm into whatever hellish den of cultists lay below. Micah sprinted for the opening, mouthing the words to another spell as he jumped down into the dark.
Micah landed amidst a crowd of forgotten—dozens of them, all shackled to metal poles that jutted from the ground and forced to stand. On the other end of the bar’s basement was a macabre orchestra, illuminated by the baleful flicker of three braziers that surrounded the musicians.
The organ was fairly normal—except the piping, which was clearly made from human bones—but every other instrument was worse than the one before. The harp was made from a human spine, stretched and elongated with magic until it was large enough to be strung with tendons. The bells were skulls, a metal pipe jammed through them to keep them in place while a hooded woman used a human femur in place of a mallet to play them.
But all of that paled before the chorus itself. Ten heads, eyes wide with terror and stitched together into a mound of tortured flesh. It burned with an infernal green light. The heads ignored all laws of anatomy, unleashing a keening wail despite having no lungs or throats to power the sound.
Then Micah finished his spell, and poison fog obscured his view of the orchestra for a fraction of a second. He took that moment to dart behind a crude table made from stone and covered in tools and reagents used for ritual magic.
The room exploded as the torches ignited the fog. Micah’s ears popped when the pressure wave from the blast rolled over him, deafening him for a moment even as it silenced the chorus permanently. The ground shook under his feet, and almost immediately the foul smell of cooking flesh assaulted his nostrils.
For a second, he remained crouched behind the table, waiting. When nothing happened, Micah popped his head out, casting augmented mending on himself to fix his ruptured eardrums.
The basement was a charnel house. None of the forgotten had survived the explosion, and all but one of the musicians were dead, crushed beneath a cave-in from the tavern above. Despite the damage, all of the instruments had survived, maintained by the dark magic that powered them even under mounds of dirt and decaying wood.
He picked his way through the wreckage, stopping in front of the organ. Pokkan lay there, half-buried under a beam that had fallen from the ceiling and crushed both of his legs. The man coughed, wetting his lips with his blood, but Micah barely even noticed.
Adorning the wall behind the chorus, like the antlers of a prized deer or the taxidermized shape of a trophy fish, sat a spear. Micah’s blood ran cold.
That was Trevor’s spear. He’d spent days designing the ritual to enchant it, and hour after hour etching the intricate runes that powered the weapon.
He glanced down at the half-conscious Pokkan, casting augmented mending on the injured man and not caring whether the spell caused his wounds to close around chunks of wood or metal embedded in him. Just as the man seemed to come to, Micah reached down, grabbed him by a dirt-stained tunic, and pointed at the weapon mounted on the wall.
“Where is he?” Micah growled, shaking Pokkan slightly when his eyes began to lose focus. “The man who wielded this spear. Where did he go?”
Pokkan looked up at him, uncomprehending. Then a malicious grin split his face. “The gambler? The one that asked too many questions around town?”
“Yes,” Micah spat out, struggling to keep his voice under control. “The gambler.”
Pokkan began laughing—a mad cackle punctuated by a rasp, as if the air were struggling to escape the forgotten’s damaged throat.
Micah grabbed him by the shoulder, squeezing until his prisoner’s bone snapped under the pressure. Rather than dissuade Pokkan, Micah’s actions only caused the man to redouble his deranged cackle.
“You fool,” Pokkan choked out through his peels of uncontrollable laughter. “For all of your power, you’re five hours too late. The Bishop took your friends just after lunch. They aren’t the type that can take the Chorus’ blessing, but we aren’t the type to waste a gift when it’s handed to us. I just wish that I could live to see the power of the instruments the Bishop crafts out of their twisted bodies.”
“Fuck,” Micah muttered, reaching up to touch one of the Maarikava fangs jutting out from his shoulder armor. “Second time's the charm.”
Pokkan kept laughing even as time slowed to a halt. Then Micah felt himself being dragged backward, retracing his steps until he closed his eyes and let the world disappear into a blur of reversed movement.
When he opened them again, he was standing on the bow of the barge, Jakint’s massive walls growing on the horizon with the morning sun low in the sky. Plenty of time before lunch.
TWENTY-ONE
RESCUE
“Leeka,” Micah called out, turning away from the glittering river.
The orange-skinned woman jumped, a guilty look on her face and her cheeks puffed out as she stuffed a piece of fruit into her mouth. “Wuh ss it?” she tried to respond through a wad of juicy pulp. A second later, her throat bobbed as she swallowed the food. “What do you need?”
“How do you feel about a little swim?” Micah asked, nodding toward the water. “We’re running a bit behind, but so long as you don’t mind getting a little wet, it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.”
Leeka squinted at Jakint in the distance. It loomed above the water, its fortifications dominating the landscape.
She glanced back at Micah and raised a single eyebrow. “We’re at least an hour or two from the port. How in the name of the Sixteen do you plan on turning swimming into a shortcut this far out?
“Wait,” Leeka interjected before Micah could answer. “Are we smuggling something into the city? Maybe it’s a forbidden artifact of one of those daemons you told me about. Is that why we’re trying to avoid the City Guard?”
“No,” Micah answered dryly. “Although half the enchanted items I’m carrying would probably raise eyebrows if the guard actually inspected them, none of them are explicitly banned. In reality, I have some spells that will let me see the near future. Suffice it to say that my family is in danger, and by the time this ship docks it might already be too late.”
“Are you sure?” she asked. “I haven’t seen you cast anything. You’ve just been staring off into the sunrise for almost an hour. Then you just jumped up and turned around to talk to me about this out of nowhere.”
“Just trust me on this, please?” he implored, reaching up to rub both his temples with his index finger and thumb. “You know I have my secrets, Leeka. Please consider this one of them and follow my lead.”
“Fine.” She stood up on her tiptoes, peering over Micah’s head. Then she bit her lower lip, squinting as she tried to discern some secret hidden in the glare reflecting off the river.
“What in the name of the Sixteen are you doing?” Micah questioned, not removing his hand from his face. “You were just agreeing to jump into the water with me, and—”
“The last time someone told me to jump in the water,” Leeka replied, not making eye contact with Micah as she raised a hand to shield her eyes, “it was because they’d angered a feral ursine fiend. I was just making sure that you hadn’t enraged some sort of primal power before we did something so drastic as to get wet.”
Micah rolled his eyes, planting both of his hands on the tall woman’s side and pushing her over the waist-high wooden safety wall that ringed the barge. Leeka’s squawk of surprise was accompanied by a stream of angry chattering from Jakaw.
“Grab onto my back,” he shouted over the splash of Leeka hitting the water while lashing his spear to his side. “I doubt you’ll be able to keep up otherwise.”
Then he dove off the ship’s deck, joining her in the surprisingly chilly water a second later. Leeka sputtered to the surface, Jakaw clinging unhappily to the braid of her hair. She bobbed unevenly and struggled to stay above the water by flailing her limbs in an untrained fashion as she glared at Micah.
He paddled over to her, letting the larger woman drape her arms around his neck and lock her hands before he began swimming toward Jakint. The second he kicked off, using the entirety of his Body attribute to send them rocketing upriver, Leeka started sputtering above him. Evidently, Micah was moving fast enough that the spray of river water from his passage was being directed right into her face.
Mentally, Micah made a note to use healing magic on Leeka once they arrived at Jakint. He had no idea what sort of diseases or parasites there might be in the swift-flowing water of the river, but they had enough to do without Leeka spending an hour or so throwing her guts up when they arrived.
He didn’t know if he could trust Pokkan’s dying words. The man might have been lying, taunting Micah to make him feel helpless. Still, it wasn’t like he had any other leads. Trevor had been in the abandoned bar’s basement, and now he was gone. All Micah could do was hope to arrive before his friends and family were moved.
Barely ten minutes later, Micah’s hands hit the silty bottom of the river as he neared shore just outside Jakint. He stood up, letting Leeka fall off his back with a splash. A quartet of guards around the massive stone city gates eyed the two of them with a combination of confusion and suspicion as he waded to shore.
Micah waved cheerfully to them, doing his best to ignore Leeka dry-heaving next to him before casting panacea on his struggling companion. The spell washed over her, and the orange woman glared up at Micah balefully.
Rather than respond, Micah walked toward Jakint. A road made of stone bricks and mortar ran parallel to the river, eventually splitting off into branches that traveled up and down the coast. Another followed the river toward the Grass Sea. The road itself was wide enough for two carriages to run in either direction, clearly designed to serve the heavy mercantile traffic of a major trading city. On either side of the highway were ruts from wagon wheels where carriages had strayed into the mud. Already they were showing signs of fading as repeated rains began to wash the damage away.
The pathway was empty. In the distance, Micah thought he saw some carriages pulled by oxen traveling north up the coast, but it was clear that the merchants were avoiding the city. Other than Leeka and the handful of suspicious guards, there was no one within shouting distance—a worrying sign for a city like Jakint, which relied upon trade to keep itself supplied.
“Hello!” Micah called out, waving a hand over his head. “I just finished an energizing morning swim, and now I’m seeking entrance into your fair city! What do I need to do to gain entry to Jakint?”
“You want to get into the city?” a female guard asked, leaning against her pike before shouting over her shoulder at someone standing atop the city’s stone walls. “Oi! Reggie, what do we do with someone that wants into Jakint? I’ve only got orders about attackers and keeping people from getting out?”
“Do you mean that if I entered the city, I wouldn’t be able to get out?” Micah questioned, raising an eyebrow.
“Well, yeah,” she responded before perking up. “Say, that doesn’t make you not want to enter, does it? If you say you don’t want to go into Jakint, then we don’t have to look up what the orders are regarding ingress.”
