Volume 1, Chapter 9: Good News: More Problems (Patreon)

Brigid flew ahead of me, lighting the way. Despite the occasional rays of sunlight filtering through the leaves suspended above our heads, it was still fairly dark beneath the trees.

Her presence, as I had become almost completely certain from watching the local lizards and what appeared to be feathered snakes, discouraged the wildlife from attempting a closer acquaintance with our modest two-person group.

I followed slowly behind her, holding the crowbar in my right hand and using my left to support myself wherever I could. I could feel the exhaustion not only in my soul, but also in my feet and calves from constantly trudging through soft, shifting sand.

My fireball hummed a cheerful little melody, delighted by her success in creating a hand for herself. It still extended from the lower portion of her round body, burning with lively flame. I looked down at my own palm, trying to keep my balance without using it for support. The skin was burned and stung, but fortunately, the injury was nothing serious and would heal in time.

Unfortunately, it was now obvious that the Path I had chosen came with risks of its own. When I made my decision, I had relied entirely on instinct, which told me that controlling fire was the most magical and badass of all the options I had been given. I had assumed that once the flames submitted to my control, they would do so without hurting me.

Now, however, I understood that both the place I had been thrown into and the circumstances surrounding me were stacked against me, and from now on I would have to act accordingly.

“You’re, um, lost in thought again,” Bri said, turning toward me while maintaining her direction of flight. “Is it the, um, thirst?”

“Both. I’m trying to hammer it into my head that I’m in an unnatural situation, one created for some kind of cosmic game, and that what I perceive as luck or misfortune is actually part of a scenario someone—or something—designed for its own purposes.” I listened closely to the sounds coming from the crowns of those strange trees. Birds, or so I assumed, were calling to one another up there, but every so often I could also hear them taking flight and heading mostly in the same direction. “Let’s go that way.” I pointed Bri toward it, hoping the animals here needed to drink water too.

“Mhm,” she hummed, releasing two thin trails of smoke from the corners of her mouth as she flew lower beneath a cluster of thick, leafy branches.

I had to admit that, despite being a creature made of fire, she was remarkably good at not setting everything around her ablaze simply by being there.

“Do you pay special attention to where you are in relation to everything around you so you don’t set anything on fire?”

“Well, how do I put it… I can sort of feel the things around me, and I know how far away I, um, need to stay so I don’t touch them with myself.”

“Maybe your brain understands your body as more than just the flames themselves, but also the area they can reach. I don’t know, but it’s interesting,” I replied, hopping over a cluster of larger rocks. “That would mean you deliberately fly closer to me than is safe, though, wouldn’t it? Admit it.”

“Well… how do I say this? I feel the need to be, um, closer to you. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right, Bri. I can handle it.” As I answered, I narrowed my eyes. The path ahead was fairly straight, and doing so both eased the dizziness a little and allowed me to focus more clearly on the sounds around us.

I could hear a rushing noise somewhere in the distance.

It sounded like flowing water, and given my current situation, that was more than enough reason to abandon everything and head toward it. Fortunately, I hadn’t a need to abandon anything, so I merely quickened my pace. Bri noticed and began flying faster as well.

Once again, her existence and the way she functioned occupied my thoughts. I wondered how she increased her speed without legs to propel her, and whether there was any limit beyond which she could no longer fly faster. There was something physical at her center, something I had managed to grab while pulling her from the mole-creature’s jaws, so some kind of limit had to exist.

“Fuck,” I cursed quietly under my breath, faster than my mind could stop my mouth. Hoping no explanation would be necessary, I withdrew into myself and began considering why I was like this.

For as long as I could remember, this tendency to overanalyze everything—to search for the truth of why something was the way it was and why it worked the way it did—had been both my greatest affliction and my greatest strength.

It was the trait that made me a good artist, allowing me to find whatever was interesting within reality and capture it through art.

It was also what made me a good thief. I understood where people looked, how they protected their possessions, what made them who they were, and what compelled them to act.

But that same condition sometimes caused my mind to stop and spin endlessly in circles, unable to move forward until I found a satisfying answer to whatever puzzle had taken hold of me.

“I think I hear something rushing ahead of us. I think it might be, um… water. That’s what the sound reminds me of.” Bri turned toward me and tilted slightly to one side, pulling her lips to the other and pursing them while looking in the opposite direction.

“What’s wrong? Don’t be embarrassed.”

“I’m a little… afraid of water, you know?”

“Don’t worry. I’m not planning to drown you in it, assuming that’s even possible. Couldn’t you just fly over the surface?”

“I don’t know… I don’t think so.”

“Never mind. We’ll find out when we get the chance. For now, let’s head toward the sound you noticed,” I replied, and despite her fear, she followed my request without another word.

Along the way, I managed to kill three more lizards with the crowbar as they basked in the sunlight atop exposed rocks. I tossed their bodies loose into the bottom of my bag, no longer caring about the mess they might make. I already smelled like a goat in a shirt saturated with the stench of their carcasses.

We continued like that for several minutes as the forest floor gradually began to rise, making each step more difficult. The tree ferns grew farther apart the closer we came to the rushing sound, but something strange kept bothering me.

Despite the noise steadily growing louder, the air was not becoming any cooler or more humid. Quite the opposite—the fewer trees stood in our path, the warmer it became. The clear blue sky grew increasingly visible through the thinning patches of leaves above our heads, and more sunlight fell across both of us and the sand beneath my feet, forcing me to avoid the stones heated by its rays.

“Whoa!” I shouted, hunching forward and covering my head as something screeching suddenly burst past me, followed by a gust of wind that missed my skull by mere inches.

I ducked and braced myself against the nearest tree, watching a flock of brightly colored, small, four-winged birds fly off in the direction we had been heading. They wheeled through the air, trying to avoid Bri as well. The moment she noticed them, she began darting from side to side, attempting to move out of the path of what had started as a single bird and then, an instant later, became an entire swarm of creatures diving from the leaves above us.

There were so many of them that, for the brief moment when their frantic flight began, they completely blotted out the sky.

Once the last of them had disappeared into the distance, I gathered myself and headed toward my companion.

“You all right?”

“Yeah. They startled me a little, but I’m fine,” she replied, hovering in the air before me.

“The sound’s getting louder. The water must be close now. Can we keep going?”

“Mhm,” she hummed, nodding with her entire fiery body, which currently consisted of little more than a head and a single hand. Then she turned and resumed flying.

I followed her, tightening my grip on the crowbar. My head was still spinning slightly, but not enough to stop me from walking without support.

Only a few moments later, we reached the edge of the wall of trees. The instant I stepped out from beneath them, I was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of light that fell upon me. I narrowed my eyes and raised a hand above them for additional shade, shielding myself from the thing hanging high in the sky, which was taking its job extremely seriously—perhaps a little too seriously.

What I saw, I instinctively called the sun, but it clearly looked nothing like the one Earth had gotten me used to. At the center of that star hung a dark sphere, from which a pillar of light stretched toward the edge of the sky. A matching column of light ran in the opposite direction, while the glow itself came from a golden-white disk circling that darkness at the center and spilling radiance across the heavens. I stood there for a moment, staring at the incredible sight.

“Something, um, wrong?”

“No, nothing,” I replied, forcing my attention back toward more mundane problems.

The ground changed into almost the exact opposite of what we had crossed before. Instead of sand interrupted by occasional patches of stone, rocks jutting from the earth and smaller stones scattered between them, huge boulders and rocks now made up most of the terrain. Sand remained only in the places where the steady breeze had failed to carry it away.

I looked to the right, where an enormous gray, white, and black cloud of dust was being driven toward us across the desert horizon. Then I looked straight ahead.

Beyond a narrow stretch of desert sand, a low mesa rose from the ground, its rocks black and sharply pointed. Thin trails of smoke drifted into the air from somewhere within it, suggesting a source of fire and perhaps civilization.

“Good news!” Bri suddenly shouted over the loud sound of rushing, hovering above a larger cluster of gray-brown boulders ahead.

I hurried toward her as quickly as I could, carefully jumping from one stone to the next. Wherever the larger rocks failed to cast shade on the ones below my feet their heated surfaces burned through the meager insulation of my socks. I hissed with every step and quickly changed tactics, searching for a route that remained beneath the protection of the taller stones.

“Water?” I asked once I was close enough that I no longer needed to shout.

My throat was strongly objecting to any attempt at raising my voice. Leaning against the larger rocks, I placed each step slowly and carefully as I approached the source of the rushing sound, until I reached the edge of what turned out to be a small canyon.

“No, actually… not water… so I won’t have to, um, be afraid to cross it,” Bri replied from only a few steps away. “Now that I think about it, that’s actually bad news. Sorry.” She added the last part as I held on to a large boulder on my right, looked down.

Sand flowed through the canyon, frothing and throwing plumes into the air like waves crashing against rocks. It rose and fell like a river, its tiny grains spraying into the air while stones and chunks of rock were carried along by the current of that strange and deeply disappointing phenomenon. They struck the hard black formations jutting from the channel, which resembled the teeth of some enormous beast.

Small, furry creatures resembling mice, each with a flat tail, leaped from the river of sand to catch insects flying above it before vanishing back beneath the flowing surface.

Overwhelmed by thirst and exhaustion, but most of all by disappointment, I slowly sat down on a rock.

“Fucking bullshit,” I whispered.

“Don’t worry, um, look over there—on that big, uh, flat hill.” Bri drew my attention, and I looked once more toward the mesa on the other side of the canyon. “Isn’t that… water?” she added, and I shook my head, trying to find the place she meant, until at last my gaze settled on a thin blue-white line falling from the top onto the stone below it.

“Yes…” I whispered. “That really does look like water, Bri,” I added, just as the sky flashed, as if lightning had struck somewhere nearby.

[WELCOME, CHOSEN. DO NOT BE AFRAID!] Images, smells, sounds—including words and their meanings—and other sensations flooded into my mind, driving me to my knees.

They seemed to come from both nowhere and everywhere at once. Although they were not my thoughts, their source lay within my own head—or, as I realized, within the crystalline device embedded inside it.

[UNFORTUNATELY, DUE TO COMPLICATIONS INVOLVING THE GAUNTLET CREATED FOR THE GOCHIANS, WE HAVE ONLY NOW BEEN ABLE TO DELIVER THE OPENING ANNOUNCEMENT. I AM THE ORACLE, AND I OVERSEE THE EVENT WITH COMPLETE IMPARTIALITY SO THAT THE GREATEST AND ALL THOSE WATCHING MAY DERIVE THE MAXIMUM POSSIBLE ENJOYMENT FROM IT. I ADDRESS YOU WITH TREMENDOUS ADMIRATION FOR THE SACRIFICE YOU HAVE AGREED TO MAKE. NOT EVERYONE WOULD BE CAPABLE OF SUCH A THING. WELL DONE!]

The news, as I understand them, pissed me off, because even though deep down I knew that if anyone had actually given me a choice, I probably would have accepted the challenge prepared for me here, the fact that I had never truly been offered one was deeply irritating.

[BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION, THERE ARE SEVERAL RULES YOUR ASSIGNED HANDLERS MAY OR MAY NOT HAVE EXPLAINED TO YOU. I WILL THEREFORE CLARIFY THAT EACH GAUNTLET LASTS FOR EXACTLY ONE FULL ORBIT OF THE PLANET PREPARED FOR YOU AROUND ITS PRIMARY STAR—UNLESS WE DECIDE OTHERWISE. THAT LAST STIPULATION APPLIES TO VIRTUALLY ALL HARD-AND-FAST RULES, SO MAKE SURE YOU FULLY UNDERSTAND EVERYTHING WE COMMUNICATE TO YOU AS IT COMES. DURING THAT TIME OF THE FIRST GAUNTLET, EACH OF YOU HAS BEEN ASSIGNED ONE PRIMARY OBJECTIVE THAT MUST BE COMPLETED IN ORDER TO ADVANCE TO THE NEXT ROUND.]

[IN ADDITION, WE WILL REGULARLY ASSIGN YOU SECONDARY OBJECTIVES THROUGH WHICH YOU MAY EARN EVENT ACHIEVEMENT POINTS AND OTHER REWARDS. THESE POINTS ARE RECORDED WITHIN YOUR DAIMONS, AND AT SPECIALLY PREPARED LOCATIONS, YOU WILL BE ABLE TO SCAN YOUR DAIMON AND EXCHANGE THEM FOR ADDITIONAL PRIZES OR BONUSES! EXCITING, ISN’T IT!?]

It was indeed kind of exciting.

[SOME OF YOU HAVE ALREADY DISCOVERED THIS, BUT YOUR DAIMON SERVES AS A GUIDE NOT ONLY ALONG YOUR PATH, INFORMING YOU HOW YOUR MAGIC FUNCTIONS AND HOW BOTH IT AND YOU MAY BE DEVELOPED, BUT ALSO THROUGHOUT THE EVENT. IT WILL NOTIFY YOU OF ACTIVE OBJECTIVES, REMIND YOU OF COLLECTED ACHIEVEMENT POINTS, AND ESTIMATE THE STANDARDIZED QUANTITY OF THE ESSENCE OF AUTHORITY YOU HAVE GENERATED.]

[THIS CLEVER DEVICE WILL ALSO ALLOW YOU TO IMPROVE YOUR ABILITIES AND, AFTER REACHING CERTAIN THRESHOLDS—WHICH WE LEAVE FOR YOU TO DISCOVER—TO ADVANCE TO HIGHER LEVELS OF YOUR ASSIGNED PATH. DO NOT BE AFRAID TO SPEND YOUR POINTS. FURTHER STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT DEPEND ONLY ON THE TOTAL AMOUNT OF ESSENCE YOU HAVE GENERATED, NOT THE AMOUNT YOU CURRENTLY POSSESS! SPEND THEM FREELY AND NEVER HESITATE!]

The delight conveyed along with that final piece of information somehow had the exact opposite effect from what the thing intended, and I began to doubt whether following its instructions was really worth it.

[YOUR PRIMARY OBJECTIVE IS THE MOST IMPORTANT. IF YOU FAIL TO COMPLETE IT, YOUR FATE WILL REMAIN BOUND TO THE PLANET ON WHICH YOU CURRENTLY FIND YOURSELVES. THEREFORE, MAKE HASTE—BUT DO NOT NEGLECT YOUR SECONDARY OBJECTIVES. EVERYONE LOVES WATCHING YOUR STRUGGLES!]

[EARTHLINGS! I NOW ADDRESS YOU, FORMER INHABITANTS OF THE PLANETS YOU DESIGNATE AS EARTH. YOU BEGAN THE EVENT WITH AN IMPRESSIVE TOTAL OF 1,231,007,028 CHOSEN! THAT IS QUITE A NUMBER, CONSIDERING YOU WERE TAKEN FROM ONLY SEVEN STABLE ITERATIONS! ONCE AGAIN, WELL DONE!]

[THERE ARE NOW 804,067,789 OF YOU.]

Excuse me? What the actual fuck?

[STILL NOT BAD! IT COULD BE BETTER, BUT IT IS FAR FROM THE WORST POSSIBLE RESULT. THE EARTHS STILL HAVE A CONSIDERABLE CHANCE OF CONTINUING TO EXIST WITHIN THE UNIVERSE. DO NOT BE AFRAID. THESE EARLY LOSSES ARE ALWAYS THE GREATEST, AS THEY ELIMINATE THOSE WHO WOULD NOT HAVE SURVIVED THE LATER STAGES ANYWAY. WE EXPECT THOSE OF YOU STILL WITH US TO PERFORM CONSIDERABLY BETTER.]

[ALEXANDER MAY, YOUR OBJECTIVE IS TO REACH THE CITY KNOWN AS SALIRION, GAIN THE FAVOR OF THE LOCAL LAW-ENFORCEMENT AUTHORITIES, AND IDENTIFY AND EITHER KILL OR BRING TO JUSTICE THE SERIAL MURDERER WHOSE CRIMES ARE DISRUPTING THE CITY’S ORDER. THIRTY-SEVEN PEOPLE HAVE BEEN ASSIGNED THIS OBJECTIVE. GOOD LUCK!]

One of those people was already working with me, leaving thirty-five others with whom I had to compete directly, as well as countless others who might interfere with me either accidentally or deliberately.

[NOW THAT OUR DELIGHTFUL INTRODUCTION IS COMPLETE, I AM PLEASED TO INFORM YOU THAT A SECONDARY OBJECTIVE HAS APPEARED NEAR EACH OF YOU. COMPLETING IT WILL EARN YOU NOT ONLY POINTS, BUT ALSO A REWARD CHOSEN FOR THE VICTOR BY THE WATCHING SLEEPERS!]

A powerful sense of the direction I needed to travel in order to participate in the secondary objective appeared within my mind, delivered by the Daimon as pure information.

[GOOD LUCK! THAT WILL BE ALL FOR TODAY. UNTIL THE NEXT TRANSMISSION!]