Vainglory: A LitRPG Adventure, page 4
“Get on the ground,” he growled, defaulting to old habits again as his mind whirled. To his delight, the scav complied, lying on her chest, snout to the side, hands spread. Ward checked the other two and saw the one he’d first shot was lying in a heap, unmoving against a burned tree. The other, the one he’d shot through the neck, was lying on its side, panting in short, quick breaths. Ward had a feeling he or she wasn’t long for this world.
“Well! That went better than I thought! I knew I liked how you handled those cultists.” Grace stepped out from behind a nearby tree and approached him. “You should just shoot this other one. You don’t want her to find you in the night and slit your throat.”
“Why the hell can I understand her?”
“Huh?” the scav asked. She was squeezing her eyes shut, but she peeled one open, a big, honey-colored orb wet with moisture, and rolled it in the socket to better look at Ward. “Did you ask me something?”
“She can understand you because you’re speaking her language. Well, I’m doing it for you. I told you I would help you, didn’t I?”
“You’re what?” Ward was very damn sure he was speaking English. He could feel his mouth moving and hear the words in his ears.
“Ward, you gotta get with it—”
“Sir, my brother, he’s dying!” The scav sounded desperate, and Ward had to take a beat to realize what an asshole he was being. The guy might look like he was part dog, and he might have been trying to kill him, but a man shouldn’t be so callous while another person was bleeding out in front of him.
“Can you help him?” he asked his prisoner.
“Yes!”
“Do it. Don’t try anything funny, or I’ll have to start shooting.”
“Oh, brother! What’s going on here, Ward?” Grace took two quick steps toward him, reached up, and flicked one of her pointy red nails against his earlobe. It felt like a wasp stung him.
“Ouch!” He slapped a hand to his ear and scowled at her. “What the hell?” The female scav who’d scurried over to kneel over her gasping, bleeding brother jerked her head up and narrowed her strange lupine eyes at him.
“Ward! What are you going to do with these scavs? Suppose she saves the hurt one? Now you’ve got two people with vendettas against you loose in the world. Just finish them off!”
Ward whirled on Grace and growled, “I don’t do that kind of shit!”
“What? Come on, Ward! I saw you basically assassinate Lafferty and his crew—”
“That’s different. There were dead bodies around; they had you tied up in a circle—”
“Not me—”
“And they came at me with knives!” Ward waved off Grace’s objection, and in the process, he let his gaze fall on the scav and saw she was staring at him with wide yellow-brown eyes and an open mouth from which hung a pink tongue.
She ran that long tongue over her snout and sniffed. “Are you okay? You’re not talking to me, are you?”
“Now you’ve done it,” Grace sighed. “Pretty soon, everyone on Cinder’s gonna be talking about the raving lunatic in the burn belt.”
“Can it, Grace.” Ward sighed and shook his head, then walked over to the scav. “He gonna make it?”
“No.” She made a faint whimpering sound, and Ward almost reached down to stroke her furry head between the ears. He stepped back, though, reminding himself that this was a person and she’d just been set on killing him.
“Look, I’m sorry about your loss, but you folks were aiming to kill me, right?”
“I suppose.” She sniffed and rubbed a hairy arm over her moist, black nostrils.
“Well, I’m gonna take one of your packs and all the guns, and then we’re going to walk in opposite directions. Understand?” He’d folded his arms over his chest, but he still held the .357, and he tapped it against his elbow, letting the metal clink as a reminder that he was in charge.
“The first reasonable thing you’ve said.” Grace walked around in a slow circle behind the scavenger, scrutinizing her. “Don’t forget about the knife on her belt.”
“You can keep your knife, but keep your hands away from it until we’re gone.”
“We?” The scavenger looked left and right, then scrutinized Ward, and, despite her canine appearance, he could read what she was thinking—he was nuts.
“Yeah,” he covered. “You and me. You can play with your knife all you want when we’re both gone from here.” He looked past her to the crumpled corpse of the first scav he’d shot. “I’ll get his pack, but you need to come with me. I’m not going to turn my back on you. Got it?”
The scav whimpered as she stood up from her brother’s body, but she complied, and soon, maybe ten minutes later, Ward had a big backpack filled with random odds and ends, three big-barreled, breech-loading pistols, and a cloth sack full of brass cartridges. The bullets were long and wide, almost the size of a 410-shotgun shell, but unlike any caliber Ward was familiar with. Grace paced and muttered the whole time he’d been going through the scavs’ packs and weapons, clearly irritated with him and the mercy he’d shown.
When Ward shouldered the heavy canvas pack, he looked to the surviving scavenger and watched as she carried a stone over and set it beside her brother’s furry leg. “You’re gonna build a cairn over him?”
“Yes. I promise I won’t follow you after I finish.”
“Oh, come on, Ward!” Grace called from further down the slope.
“Right. Well, good luck.” Ward thought about it for a minute, and then he reached into the sack where he’d stuffed the pistols, took one out, and set it on a nearby stone. “I’ll leave a couple of bullets a bit further down.”
“Thank you, stranger. I’m Lizzy.”
“Ward.” He nodded to her, then turned and, after taking ten or fifteen steps, put two big brass bullets on a rock. He glanced back to see Lizzy watching him, and then he continued marching toward Grace’s distant, slender, black-clothed form. When he caught up to her, she was sitting on a flat stone beside which a tall, green sapling grew. It had tiny branches, and from them sprouted thousands of little V-shaped leaves.
“Take a seat.” She pointed to a stone next to her.
“We’re not going further?”
“Sure, we are, but not yet. We’ll wait for your girlfriend to leave, and then we’ll see if you can sense or, if luck is with us, even see mana.”
“What’s it got to do with her?”
Grace shifted, folding her legs under her, and then met Ward’s eyes with hers. She stared at him for a long moment. “When someone dies, their anima breaks up and drifts out of their bodies as mana. If you leave a body alone long enough, the mana will disburse into the universe, but there’s a little time when the mana lingers, and that’s when people with the right talent can see it. Some lucky ones can even gather it up in themselves. We’ll see if you’re one of those people.”
“You think I am?”
“I have a sneaking suspicion, but I’ve been wrong before.”
Ward grunted and sat down on the rock she’d pointed to. “What if Lizzy takes it?”
“The mana? No chance. There wasn’t a trace of talent in those three, which was damn lucky, by the way, Ward. You could have run into far worse!” She yawned and stretched her legs, lying back with her fingers entwined behind her head, supporting it. “Now, just relax a while and wait for that little scav to wander off, and we’ll see what’s what.”
Ward grunted, only partially listening to her. He’d shifted the pack around in front of him and was digging out a strange item he’d seen. When he found it, he held it up—a plate of copper-colored metal about the size of a tablet. In fact, it was the reason he’d grabbed it and stuffed it into the pack; it had reminded him of his iPad. The metallic backing was tarnished with green and blue, but the front was glass, and he thought he could see a sheen of iridescent liquid behind it. “The hell is this thing?”
“What?” Grace opened her eyes and peered over at him. “Oh, probably junk. I’d toss it.”
Ward ignored her and continued to study the thing. On the front, in the lower left corner, a slight depression in the metal casing caught his eye. Tiny flecks of rust or something like it stained the metal there. Ward flaked the stuff away with his thumbnail, and when he held his nail up to the light, he knew exactly what it was. “Blood,” he grunted.
“Seriously, Ward, quit wasting your time. Scavs don’t generally carry good equipment.”
Again, Ward ignored her, but not so much that he didn’t realize she didn’t want him looking at the object in his hands. He pressed his thumb into the indentation—nothing happened. He could hear Grace shifting, moving off the stone, and stepping quietly toward him. His mind fixated on the blood, and, feeling rushed, he picked up one of the knives he’d taken from the scavs, carefully notching a tiny cut into the side of his pinky.
Suddenly, Grace was beside him, hissing into his ear, “What are you doing, Ward? Quit wasting time. Are you trying to get infected?”
“Relax,” Ward grunted, then he touched the droplet of blood on his pinky into the little depression on the tablet. Grace hissed, and he could hear the frustration in her tone, but she stomped away just as the weird liquid behind the glass started to shift and form strange patterns. Ward stared, fascinated, as the undeniable lines of letters and numerals began to form, solidifying into a little table.
Bloodline: Basic Human (h)
Accumulated Mana: 2
Mana Sensitivity: Bronze
Mana Pathways: Tin
Vessel Capacity: Tin
Vessel Durability: h + 0
Vessel Strength: h + 0
Vessel Speed: h + 0
Longevity Remaining: ~40%
Anima: NIL
“Um, Grace? What the hell is all this?”
5
MANA
Grace, who’d wandered a few feet away and was busily poking at a tuft of green grass that had managed to take root in the thinning ash layer, turned toward him with an arched eyebrow. “All what?”
Ward had seen a witness or suspect play dumb before, and he wasn’t buying it. “Quit playing games, all right? Explain this thing to me.” He held up the metal and glass tablet.
“It’s just junk, Ward. I told you those scavs won’t have good tech. It’s called, I believe, a hemograph or vitalscope. It uses glyphs—written words of power—to force the ambient mana to perform an analysis of your blood.” She sighed and stood up, stomping toward him. “Thing is, Ward, you got this off a dead scav, and I doubt it’s a very good one. I doubt it’s calibrated to read a person like you, a person from Earth, properly.” She peered over his shoulder at the chart and clicked her tongue as she perused the numbers.
“It identified me as human, which seems to contradict what you just said—”
“Identifying a bloodline is different from understanding it! These are very basic details. I’ve read texts about hemographs that could tell much more about a person.” She paused and made a soft humming sound. “Well, I like that it thinks you have ‘bronze’ mana sensitivity.”
“Is that good?”
“I’ve no idea, but it sounds better than ‘tin,’ doesn’t it?”
Ward frowned and tapped his finger on the display. To his dismay, the action scattered the strange liquid, erasing the table. “I, uh, couldn’t help noting the ‘NIL’ where my anima should have been.”
Grace stood and arched her back, looking away from him as she stretched. After a moment, she said, “Don’t worry about that. I’m sure a more sophisticated device will be able to read your anima more accurately.”
Ward grunted, shaking his head, his suspicions further piqued by Grace’s nonchalance. Still, he put the device in his pack and decided to put off worrying until he’d met more people and gathered more information. He was coming to terms with his new reality. Everything was too real, too visceral, to be a fever dream, at least in his experience. He’d had normal dreams, he’d tripped on surgical meds, he’d been knocked out, and he’d even had a heatstroke—nothing ever felt like this. He leaned back, bunched his raincoat up for a pillow, closed his eyes, and waited for time to pass.
Sometime later, after Grace had determined they’d waited long enough, she roused him, and they began marching back toward the scene of Ward’s encounter with the scavs. He tugged the lapels of his raincoat tight, stuffed his hands in his pockets, and shuffled after her toward the setting sun. Things had cooled down a lot as the suns dipped toward the distant horizon.
He’d dozed off a bit while they waited, which had gone a long way toward helping to convince him he wasn’t suffering from a delusion. He’d had wild dreams, far more vivid than any he could recently remember, and it didn’t seem like something that would happen if he were already dreaming this whole scenario up. He couldn’t recall his dreams clearly, but he had the impression he’d been flying or maybe floating on a big blue river. He remembered lots of laughter and camaraderie and just feeling damn good. When he’d rolled off his rock and shaken himself awake, Grace had been smiling at him, and he wondered if somehow she’d experienced his dream, too.
She paused and turned, waiting for him to catch up, and he saw that her pale hair was tinted blue. Ward turned to look at the sky and caught his breath. “Jesus.”
“It’s something, isn’t it?”
He didn’t just see a moon in the sky; he saw several. One was close and enormous, the source of the blue light, but further toward the horizon was a smaller, bright yellow moon, and in between them, clearly more distant thanks to the perspective of looking past the blue moon, was a bright, green-blue marble. Still further, Ward was sure he saw other moons or maybe distant planets. They were colorful and too large to be stars. At least he thought so. “Three moons?”
“Two and some of the other Vainglory worlds. The blue and green one is Oceana, the fourth.”
“The fourth?”
“Vainglory world! Remember they’re ranked in difficulty?”
“Right.” Ward shook his head. “What does that mean again?”
“There are challenges that an ancient culture built on these worlds. They involve mana and have valuable prizes. That’s why I brought us here. I figured you could prove yourself, and while you’re at it, you could improve yourself!” She grinned, turned on her heel, and resumed her walk toward the distant sunset. Only a sliver of colorful orange and red streaks touched the sky on the horizon by the time they stopped in front of a high, sturdy pile of stones shaped like it was meant to cover a body. The scavenger had toiled long and hard to cover up her brother’s corpse.
“Almost dark,” he grunted.
She turned to frown at him. “Wasn’t there any sort of light in that pack?”
“Yeah, I think so.” Ward shrugged out of the stained, brown canvas backpack and unfastened the buckle at the top. He’d dumped the two packs of the dead scavengers and tried to consolidate the things he wanted, but most of it was junk in his estimation. Still, he found a little copper rectangle with a single glass panel, and behind the glass, he could see a bulb. It was weirdly shaped, almost like it had been blown by hand—a custom creation. On the back was a little copper crank. “Hmm,” he muttered as he began to turn it.
The mechanism inside the lamp whirred and clicked, and he could feel it getting tighter and tighter as he cranked. When it got to the point where he feared he might break the little lever, he let go. The bulb began to tick and flicker, rapidly brightening, and soon, a warm, yellow glow shone from the glass window.
Grace nodded. “It’s good that you have a light, but for what we’re about to do, you might have an easier time in the dark. Let’s start with that poor bugger you shot first, the one who isn’t buried.”
“All right.” Ward led the way around the cairn and then up the slight slope to the crumpled form of the dead scavenger. “What’s the deal with this anyway? Who has a brass, cranking flashlight?” Ward held up the little lantern.
“Vainglory is a crossroads system. Many portals and mana pathways lead through it, and you’ll find all sorts of tech and strange people here.” She squinted at his lantern. “Can you turn the light off, or does it have to wind down?”
“I don’t know.” Ward lifted the lamp and scrutinized the back side. Sure enough, beneath the crank was a little brass switch. When he flicked it to the side, the gears inside the lamp stopped ticking, and the bulb faded to a faint orange glow and then winked out.
“Good! Now sit down here beside the corpse; face it.”
“All right.” Ward sat down on the hard-packed ash and crossed his legs before himself. He was about a foot away from the dead scavenger, and some smells were beginning to emanate from the body. He wrinkled his nose and silently hoped they’d soon be gone from the scene. Grace flopped down beside him and began to take exaggerated breaths in through her nose and out through her mouth. When Ward looked sidelong at her, marveling at how bright the blue from the moon had become, she took another deep breath and pointed at him.
“You too!” She made him take five deep breaths, in and out. “You’re trying to ground yourself, to center yourself. Push troublesome thoughts from your mind and be in the moment. Feel the air, see the moonlight, taste the copper and decay in your breaths.” Her casual acceptance of the dead body smells struck Ward as strange but also comforting; the body was part of his reality now. “Watch the scav’s body, Ward; really see it.” She grew quiet after that, and Ward did what she asked; he watched the body.
Time passed, and Ward tried to stay in the moment, to be present for the sights and smells and feelings around him, but his mind began to wander, and, for some damn reason, he started to think about his ex-wife. She’d left him nearly nine years ago in a cliché of all clichés, dumping him to start a relationship with an old high school flame she’d reconnected with through some online class reunion site. Ward wouldn’t admit it to anyone, not even his sister, but it had pretty much gutted him.
“You’re letting your mind wander.” Grace sighed, hopping up. “You don’t see anything?”
