Arcanist In Another World-Chapter 21: The Main Cave

Name: Valens Kosthal

Age: 22

Race: Human (Ancient)

Class: Arcane Healer (Ancient)

Level: 54

Experience: 38%

Trait: Resonance(Ancient)

Skills (8/10):

Lifesurge (Master) - lvl 5

Lifeward (Master) - lvl 5

Blockage (Master) - lvl 1

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Light Feet (Master) - lvl 2

Fireball (Adept) - lvl 7

Apathy (Master) - lvl 5

Inferno (Adept) - lvl 2

Gale (Master) - lvl 2

Stats:

Endurance - 12

Vitality- 13

Strength - 15

Dexterity - 25

Intelligence - 173

Wisdom - 87

Free Points: 45

General Skills (3/10):

Laran Language (Ancient) - lvl ??

Identify(Basic)- lvl 1

Mana Manipulation (Master) - lvl 8

Nine levels… The big bad monsters are better than dealing with a bunch of smaller fries, then.

Valens nodded. Felt about right getting more than a few levels from that brutal fight, one that nearly cost him his life. Terrible monsters and their terrible way of welcoming new guests. Working by the orders of some invisible mind that forced them to… well, do their Master’s bidding.

So then, this Necromancer was a sort of hivemind. A Magus, if he could call him that, who could not only resurrect the dead and animate them as though a group of puppets, he could also force his will through that lifeline to act against his enemies.

That was the only explanation why skeletons never paid any attention to each other, but caught in a frenzy when Nomad disturbed their peace. They saw him as something to be fought against, even though the undead and the Necromancer’s puppets had a certain similarity between them.

As usual, Valens poured his recently gained stats into the Intelligence and Wisdom pair, feeling that cold trickle of mana slosh into his mana pool like the waves of an enormous waterfall. He shivered and couldn’t help the smile curling around the lips at the sensation.

I can’t get enough of this feeling. More please!

He chuckled silently as he started toward the mouth of the cave. Nomad and Celme crept carefully forward, the former holding his sword tight and the latter seemed to have decided to rely solely on her fists.

The cold walls narrowed around them.

Water dripped down to the puddles on the ground. There were no bodies here. Nothing hinting that a terrible battle that erased hundreds of lives from the world had happened in this place. It was odd. Everything was odd and strangely twisted here, to Valens’s thinking.

Yet he didn’t feel out of place. Facing a monstrous creature with nothing but magic felt relatively comforting. You couldn’t control a patient’s fate. You could patch the wounds and fix what was broken inside, but you couldn’t prevent a patient from getting wounded in some pointless skirmish by the border.

Going against a beast was different. Horrifying, sure, but at no point did Valens feel he was dealing with an aftermath of some clash beyond his control. He’d been his own man during those fights, a Magus relying only on his spells and the company beside him, heart thumping wildly in his chest, skin crawling with fear and pain and thrill of the chaos.

Is this why soldiers fight?

Money and glory were a part of I,t of course, and yet they’d often mutter a curse or two after a skirmish before cracking a smile to say the thrill of the battle was one thing you just couldn’t forget. These were men haunted by those painful memories, and yet relished in them at the same time. A sort of wicked balance that hung over a tiny little pin.

Terrible, no doubt. Bloody exciting too, Valens had to say.

“Your blood boils,” he said a moment after, not to spark a conversation but more so to clear his mind from dangerous thoughts. When Celme gave him a strange look over her shoulder, he continued. “Your skin heats up. Somehow, without relying on mana, you can imitate a high-adrenaline rush by contracting your muscles alone. Your heart tightens, too.”

“So?” Celme’s voice had a throaty quality about it. Her eyes swept him yet again with a fierce look. “What about it?”

“Don’t you think it's dangerous?” Valens asked. “Are you doing it because you want to get an edge over your opponent, or are you just getting mad at the beasts? I’d say rage and fury are not particularly reliable emotions in the long run, but then again, I guess you can always find something to get furious at?”

“That’s why you can never be sure about Berserkers,” Nomad grinned with a shake of his head. “It only takes a little poke to get them rolling, and not with pleasure.”

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“Humorous,” Celme said as she swept them both with a piercing glance, her face perfectly still. “My skill doesn’t turn me into a mindless tool for murder, if that’s what you’re asking. I’ve chains around my heart to keep my feet nailed to the ground.”

Valens squinted at her, but he didn’t remember seeing any chains when fixing her bones. Then he arched an eyebrow. “And what are these chains, if you don’t mind me asking?”

Celme tapped a fist over her chest. “That’s between me and the Lord.”

Uh… I wasn’t talking about your faith, and now you made it all awkward. I can’t ask if I can put a Lifeward in your blood flow anymore.

“Sure it is,” he said instead, shaking his head off. “And you—“

“Look, Val,” Nomad cut him off. “You can’t reason with the religious guilds. They are too caught up with their mission to cleanse this world to make much sense.”

“At least we’re trying,” Celme said as her lips curled in distaste. “And while we’re serving humanity with every part of our being, what do those adventurers do? Half of them barely have the heart to face their first Trial.”

“Somebody has to do the work, though,” Nomad argued. “It’s thanks to those people who’re stuck at Level 100 that you have something of a system back in your little haven. Or else who would serve as guards or who would do all the politicking in the name of good? You can’t have everybody sweating against the Damned.”

“Stuck at Level 100?” Valens arched an eyebrow at Nomad, curious. “Why would they be stuck at Level 100?”

Celme gave him a doubtful look, but Nomad waved her off. “He doesn’t remember,” he said, before nodding at him. “You get a Trial every hundred Levels from the System. It’s a way of preparing folk for the worse. You can choose to not do it, then live your life in peace however you want, but if you want to move on, you have no other choice but to take it.”

Valens tapped his chin with a finger. That certainly was new for him. So there was a sort of limitation. “But what sort of a Trial are we talking about here? Is it similar to this Quest?”

Celme gave him a hard look. “No. Trials come from the System. They almost always involve Broken Lands in some way.”

“That’s why you don’t go for dangerous classes,” Nomad said, eyeing Celme. “A Berserker, for one, would have a bastard of a test as their First Trial. I’ve told you, it takes a certain madness to pick a class like that, but at least she knows what her First Trial’s going to be.”

“Oh, you can tell it? How?” Valens asked.

“Prior experience,” Celme answered with a hard voice. “The first three Trials don't change from person to person if they have the same class.”

So you basically have a roadmap if you choose a known class. But I didn’t get to choose mine. How does that work, exactly?

He was about to ask when Nomad stopped and raised an armored fist. The mouth of the cave lay just a few paces ahead of them, a gaping, dark hole that opened up to a stony ceiling.

“We’re there.”

Lights flashed across the jagged surface. Green lights, yellow lights, all carrying different sets of frequencies. Valens caught sharper tunes there. Arrows. They stabbed with terrible speed at the cold stone, cracked in painful shrieks and splintered into pieces. They fell in a shower of wood and steel.

Mana was in a rush below the edge. So intense that it sent a shiver down his spine. There was a low, echoing din that grew slowly distant before being replaced by another wave of chaotic sounds. People screaming. The undead growling. Terrible creatures shrieking and wailing.

“We’re behind their ranks.” Celme stepped slowly round the walls and stood a step away from the cave’s mouth, looking at them with narrowed eyes. “We tried for an ambush through the other paths around the mountain, but we were expected. That bastard knew the moment we surrounded him he’d be done for.”

“It doesn’t take a genius to predict that,” Nomad muttered, voice heavy. The tip of his sword scraped against the ground as he pulled himself near Celme and peered down from the edge. “There’s a path we can use.”

“Can I?” Valens said and stepped over to the edge. He froze the moment he laid his eyes upon the main cave.

There were lines. Sprawling, stretching lines of men that covered every inch of the ground. Like a rolling wave of black and green they thrashed against each other. Men crushed in from behind the undead ranks, vanished through the Skeleton Soldiers and added yet another color to the muddle in the centre.

Balls of fire rained down upon the Necromancer’s horde, shielded by elongated limbs of the Wards to keep the animated corpses safe. Streaks of sharp lights cleaved painfully smooth lanes across the press.

The din of the Resonance brought lives being harvested down upon the chaos to Valens’s ears. For every new set of frequencies that bloomed in his sound vision, dozens were being added to the deathly ranks of the mindless tide that pressed against the living.

He could see long, robed figures near the entrance. Large undead beasts were lounging about them like wards placed near a wound. Some of them had Heartstones larger than Nomad, but even they paled against the Masters who stood behind them.

Liches. The undead Magi that commanded the Ninth Legion’s army.

Some of them had smooth, almost rosy skin that didn’t look any different than a human’s. Some others were completely made up from bones that had a deeper color about them. One such bony figure was high on an elevated patch of rock, sitting over a jade throne that was flanked by two monstrous undead clad in full plates, all wreathed in green fog.

“Is that Lord Zahul?” Valens muttered.

Nomad gazed deeply at that figure, his fingers curling tight around the sword’s handle. “It is. Lich King Zahul, one of the Five that serve the Abyssal Lord.”

“He looks like a King alright,” Celme said with a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “Notice how he placed his throne away from the Lightmaster. Some king hiding behind his mindless horde.”

“Bah!” Nomad said with a shake of his head. “The tier of this Rift is cruel on those Liches. They have barely a quarter of their magic working, and most of it they use to keep the lines in check.”

When Valens trailed the Berserker’s gaze he saw an older, simpler man standing before the human ranks. He had to blink to check if he was seeing right, because for all the battle and chaos around him the man seemed as though he was out for a morning stroll.

The shattered bones of the Skeleton Soldiers and the chunks of flesh being ripped out from humans couldn’t reach him. Something, some invisible magic was protecting the man as he took his sweet time strolling about the clash.

Valens was about to ask if that man was Celme’s King, but he decided against it. Once he started with the questions, there was no stopping it. This battle, the sides, those people clad in different colored plates and groups of Magi that lined across the entrance… He didn’t know anything about any of these people.

His skin prickled when he turned his gaze toward the other side.

There was a terrible being there, perched over a particularly large rock. It was clad in robes as dark as the night. Clasped in its right hand was a long, gnarled staff that seemed to have been fashioned from dozens of bones, all different and thin. They were screaming, those bones. Valens heard them in his mind. Still alive, somehow, even after having been mangled into a weapon of destruction.

Nomad and Celme didn’t seem aware, but over the thrashing crowd, lines of barely visible black streaks of mana danced, coming off from the Necromancer’s withered fingers. They leashed down the moment a man or an undead fell. Latched onto their heart and soiled it with the Necromancer’s venom. They came alive as mindless creatures that attacked their own companions. The dead fell with widened, betrayed eyes looking up in confusion.

“This…” Valens swallowed. He’d been to many skirmishes in the past, and even served as a Healer in a fully-fledged siege. Men fought in those, armored men with weapons of all kinds. Men died, and men cried in every one of them.

But here men fell with cries stuck tight in their throats. They died in heaps and their bodies got crushed under the tide like bugs. Those were the lucky ones.

“We’ll get through the path and pray that the bastard won’t take notice,” Nomad said, nearing the path that slithered from the side of the edge. He glanced over the armies for a long second before his emerald eyes locked on Valens. “Stay close, Val, and keep those eyes fixed on my back.”

Valens stepped back as Celme’s skin started burning hot. Her blue eyes had blood in them as she gazed across the chaos. Her fingers shook as if she couldn’t wait to throw herself into the mix.

“And you too, woman,” Nomad said and yanked her from the arm, made her look up into his eyes. Green fog rolled round his shoulders as he growled, “We didn’t save your ass for you to jump mindlessly to become another mangled corpse down there.”

“You…” Celme’s eyes grew cold. She struggled against Nomad’s hold, but the smoke wafting off her skin eased into trickles as Nomad forced her to look at Valens.

“See him?” Nomad said, voice sharp as steel. “If something happens to that man because of your foolish fury or whatever the fuck that goes round your brain, then I’ll carve those blue eyes out and have you eat them for lunch before ripping your head. Understood?”

“W-What—“

“I’ll take that as a yes.” Nomad nodded, and smiled, and patted her on the back. He then raised a fist to the pair of them, and started his way down through the path.

Valens followed after him.

…….