Arcane Apocalypse ~ 184 (Patreon)

[Cognity: 22 -> 23]

[Memory: 18 -> 20]

[Will: 23 -> 24]

[Main Mind: 26 -> 27]

[Control: 24 -> 25]

[Sensitivity: 23 -> 25]

[Manifestation: 28 -> 31]

[Main Spirit: 30 -> 33]

[Flexibility: 20 -> 22]

[Main Body: 20 -> 21]

Mia looked over her newly gained attributes the day after their hunt of the marauding gorilla-like elite monster. She had more than enough time on the way back to nibble on some of her Natural Treasures with Gabe ferrying them all. The night had been calm, though there was a scare once when some giant cat-like magical beast wandered a bit too close to the perimeter wards for comfort. Thankfully, it had been Mia and Nikki’s turn to keep watch, so they just waited until the creature lost interest instead of getting into a needless fight with a predator in its natural environment. It had been a magical beasts besides, not a monster, so Mia felt no instinctive urge to scatter its guts across the forest floor. 

One Silverlight Pear, one Flicker Fruit and one Dawnberry. That was all it took to once more max out her Gain Attribute cap, and she still had a leftover of the latter two, along with 6 Free Attribute points waiting to be assigned. She wondered how much the regular people of the Mystic Realm would want to strangle her if they knew she was annoyed that she had too many Natural Treasure and too few Gained Attribute … slots? Capacity? Neither term rolled off the tongue well, but oh well. It got the idea across.

That Flicker Fruit kicked her Spirit stat up by three whole points, which once more pushed her over the threshold. Her expanded Rank 1 Mana Core was now fully under her control, and Mia was now able to take full advantage of its expanded mana capacity … however, it wouldn’t grow again until she reached Rank 2, as far as she was aware. Maybe her Spirit stat would have more of an effect at higher Ranks on her Mana Core’s absolute capacity, but for now, it was negligible and largely decided by her Rank. She’d crossed the point where her Spirit could just barely suppress the mana in her Core if she filled it up fully a while ago, somewhere around 23 or 24 Spirit, but it was only now that she felt like she had absolute control over the unruly pool of energy. Before, she’d liked to keep her Core a bit below its actual capacity, worried the mana would act up while she was distracted or asleep, but now that wouldn’t be an issue anymore … until Rank 2, that is.

Maybe she’d been assigning a bit too many mana points to her Spirit Sub-Attributes. 33 points of Spirit was probably a bit much for a Level 12 Mage. Those Free Attributes would probably have to go towards Flexibility to bring it even with her Agility, and the rest into Cognity to bring that attribute up to equal her Sensitivity stat. The larger the gap was between the latter two, the less Mia was able to keep track of everything within her Spirit Sense’s range … or maybe she should push Memory up instead and try to get it to the point where it stopped enhancing her memory and started augmenting her multitasking ability? Both ideas had merit, though she’d have to figure out how far that threshold was. For now, her Multitasking Secondary Skill was performing well. 

Mia’s eyes scanned the landscape below as she sat in the uncomfortable seat made of Gabe’s mana. Order aspected arcane energy was good for solid structures, but that was the problem: the structures were very solid, something which could be felt quite a bit after just ten minutes of sitting on them. At least the view made up for it. 

The regular landscape of Styria was gorgeous enough by itself, especially from this bird’s-eye view, but Mia’s gaze couldn’t help but cling to every spot that just didn’t fit. One valley was like a spot of necrotic flesh upon a healthy body, the surrounding verdant greenery interrupted by a region of withered trees and ash-grey earth. 

Ten minutes later, she saw an entire hill where the grass and trees were in various shades of blue and purple instead of green. After that, she saw a valley filled with sand, as if someone had cut out the previous piece of land and copy-pasted in a piece of the Sahara Desert. Then came a frozen bit of tundra, a small forest with flaming trees that somehow failed to cause a wildfire, a smaller mountain with a peak that floated a hundred metres above the rest of the mountain and so on and so forth. Every time she scanned the horizon, there was at least one fantastical piece of landscape interrupting the familiar Styrian wilderness. 

She could see several Monster nests, and if what Gabe said was correct, there would be five or more Rifts scattered throughout the land for every Monster Nest they could see.

The sight filled her with the same kind of muted anger she always felt when she read about some oil spill ruining a lagoon or a national park getting its size reduced because some rich asshole wanted a shopping centre, a highway or an apartment complex built in the place of the forest. Except, while the anger was still distant and somewhat muted, it was more … visceral now. It mingled with that instinctive hatred she felt for monsters and filled her with a lingering murderous rage that sat at the back of her mind, waiting for an outlet or a proper target to vent her feelings at. 

Seeking a distraction, Mia’s mind went back to that Quest and with a thought, she pulled up the System window describing it, focusing on the Objectives. Her eyes lingered on the ‘Magma Heart’ entry on the list for no particular reason besides that it sounded the coolest at a glance. With a mental flick of her will, she had the Quest start tracking that Objective. 

Her eyes widened when a small, semi-translucent sphere with an arrow inside it popped up in front of her, pointing vaguely southwards. Underneath it, a small label floated reading ‘2695 km - Firelands Dungeon’. 

Well, that was quite a ways away, that was for sure. If Mia didn’t get the distances wildly wrong, and South really was where she thought it was — she’d never been too good at orienting herself based solely on the sun’s movement across the sky — then that Dungeon would have to be somewhere in Africa, probably above the equator somewhere, maybe in the Sahara? 

*****

They were looking down at a large map that covered the entire conference table with pieces of the Americas and the Far East hanging off the edges. Four large pins were stuck into the map, nailing it to the table, and Mia was going through the process of re-checking all the angles to see whether they lined up. 

One pin was stuck into Graz’s approximate location on the map, and from it crimson strings were tied to the three other pins, the furthest of which was down right in the middle of the Sahara. 

Mia nudged the floating orb with the arrow inside it down until it lined up with the string, the back end of the arrow right where Graz’s pin was. It seemed to match up. 

“Seems good to me,” Mia said, banishing the arrow with a thought as she took a step back to take in the entire map. 

The last hour had been spent calculating distances and angles, trying to figure out the approximate location of the Dungeon and the two Rifts Mia was able to track through the Fetch Quest’s interface. Of the two Rifts, one seemed to be somewhere in Spain or Portugal, and the other, the closest one, somewhere in Transylvania or Wallachia. Either way, Mia foresaw a whole lot of hiking and mountaineering in her near future because both Rifts seemed to be right in the middle of a mountain range. Joy. 

The Dungeon would be … trickier. Not only for the distance, but because it was something new, something even Gabe had absolutely no experience with. All they had to go off of was purely academic knowledge from Nikki and rumours Gabe had heard during his adventurer days. 

Dungeons were supposed to be Rifts that had split out into the world, their small pocket dimension superimposed over real space like Monster Nests, but without dying in the process. Dungeons kept growing, kept producing monsters, and could supposedly warp space and reality itself to a lesser extent inside their reach in strange ways. 

No wonder the Shade wanted a Dungeon Core. Mia couldn’t even begin to guess what an expert ritualist could accomplish with an item like that, be it as a tool or a reagent. Unfortunately for the Shade, Mia wasn’t suicidal, so he would have to get a Dungeon Core himself if he wanted one so much, because her team would be aiming for the bare minimum requirements to complete the Quest. Anything else would have been stupid.

Even if that Bonus Reward did look tempting. Five artifacts per person instead of one, and 505 years of guardianship instead of a single century. Tempting, but not tempting enough. Mia had doubts they’d be ready for the Quest even once they crossed over into Rank 2. 

“This one’s close enough to scout if you go alone, Gabriel,” Mayor Zeigler said, tapping the pin labelled ‘Castle of Nightmares Rift’. “Correct? You could make the round trip in less than a day, from what I recall of your top flight speed.”

“Easily,” Gabe confirmed. “You want me to see what Level it is?”

Zeigler nodded briskly, his narrow eyes hiding a cunning mind behind them as the man stared at the map. 

“This could be what gives us the time to build something that lasts,” Zeigler said severely. “One hundred years of safety in this world where we don’t even know whether we will last the year. You can’t put a price on that. It's galling to rely on some shady fucker living in a cave, but I’m not going to let pride keep me from accepting much-needed help. Still, I would like to not rely on it; it should be a final safeguard, not our entire defence. If this Quest of yours falls through or this Shade fails to deliver, we will still need to be able to protect ourselves.”

“That’s what the militia and your troops are for, isn’t it?” Mia asked, and the Mayor nodded. 

“All the same, it’s been made abundantly clear that if we want to protect ourselves, we will require both a general military force to handle general threats and a much more powerful elite force to take care of larger problems,” Zeigner grunted. “If you don’t think you can complete the Quest without casualties, I would much rather have your team on hand to deal with more immediate threats like that oversized chimp the other day. Also, if you need consumables or Natural Treasures to supplement your own, just talk to my aide. Graz needs you to be as powerful as you can be.”

The unfortunate reality of being the party leader handling this Quest was that Mia had to handle the social and political aspects of the job. Brent had offered to handle it, but he made it sound like he thought it would have been really stupid and/or cowardly of her to accept. 

He used that same tone her mother had used when she offered to help her handle an HR complaint at her first job in Mia’s stead. She would have done it, but she made sure Mia knew it was her job. What kind of adult woman let her mother handle her daughter’s social stuff for her, after all? 

Just like then, she’d decided to suck it up and do the task. She’d have been mortified if others at the office learned she had sent her mother to HR to complain. Likewise, nobody would respect her if she couldn’t handle herself now. 

It’d been tempting. Her rising Will stat did nothing to lessen Mia’s dislike for stressful social situations. She was still an antisocial introvert at heart, even if the world and her circumstances forced her to act like a fully functional member of society. At least Will helped with the stress and her lifelong tendency to procrastinate over any task that made her even mildly anxious. The Will stat just helped her deal with it better, but by no means did it make he any more extroverted or something stupid like that. Heck, she was pretty sure she was still just as likely to complain about the waiter getting her order wrong as before ... which was not likely at all.

At least she had years of practice pretending she wouldn’t much rather be anywhere else but in that conference room. Although Zeigler probably saw right through her. He had to have gained more than enough experience in reading people as a high-ranking officer of the armed forces to read a single anxious ex-programmer like she was an open book. At least he was kind enough to act like he couldn’t, or maybe he just couldn’t be bothered to waste time on anything that was not the topic of their meeting.

“That’s appreciated, though we should be fine for now; those Rift rewards had been rather generous with Natural Treasures,” Mia said.

“You can also trade ones you have for other types; we’ve had a bartering system set up among the delvers. Some people don’t want to waste their limited Gained Attribute capacity on stats that don’t enhance their Skills,” Zeigler said, though he sounded like he thought they were not making the wisest choice by doing so, at least in his opinion. 

“I’ll make sure the others know,” Mia said with a nod. Maybe there was merit in hyperfocusing on the stats you needed to hit harder, but Mia was pretty sure she’d have died by now had she left her Body stats as they were when all this madness began. 

Hell, even with her rather severe disadvantage, her Strength had risen to a point where she could throw punches that made — Level 1 — grown men collapse with a wheeze. After all, her actual Strength state came out at roughly 7, which was more than twice what she’d started with. Her Agility also came in handy. Gabe had measured it, and in a dead sprint Mia could reach nearly 40 km/h. It probably helped that she barely weighed more than 40 kilos due to another quirk of her Body stats, but oh well. She very much doubted she’d ever be in a position where she would have to rely on a simple punch to save her life. Running away, however, could be a lifesaver if she could run fast enough. 

“We still need five more members; the Quest allows for ten people, and I doubt it’s because ten’s a nice round number,” Mia said. “Dungeons don’t have a limit, apparently, so we could take even more people there; they just wouldn’t get the Quest rewards.”

“I will ask around for volunteers," Zeigler promised. “Although, I think you’d have better luck asking Brent and Konstantin to do so; they have much greater sway with the militia, the delvers and the beastkin than I. Although if you want a fireteam or two to tag along, I can make it happen.”

Mia merely nodded, her eyes flickering back to the massive map, more specifically, to the pin closest to the one depicting Graz. A Rift called the ‘Castle of Nightmares’ somewhere in Transylvania that dropped Solar Gems, which were supposedly the preeminent tools for slaying undead. 

If she had to guess, Mia would bet on finding vampires and other lesser undead inside that Rift, the thought of which brought some complicated feelings. So far she’d never seen the regular version of a monster species, and she’d also never seen Carmilla act in a stereotypical evil-vampire way, but now she’d likely get to witness what regular, monstrous vampires were like. 

*****

The creature the few people on Earth who were aware of his existence knew as ‘The Master’ or ‘The Shade’ swiftly cut his projection once he’d seen all he’d wanted to see. The mortals were going along with his Quest, and while their swift dismissal of the Bonus Objective was disappointing, it was also expected and somewhat relieving. They were a bit too weak for him to be confident in succeeding after all. Not that he could be certain, with his inability to see inside the Dungeon.

Snapping back into the depths of his Lair, it was only his immense will that stopped him from fading or slipping into a slumber he might never wake from. 

The System had done him the courtesy of waking him once, but he’d used up the last of his Favours to generate that Quest. If he allowed the pull of death to latch onto him now, he would never wake within this Realm. He wasn’t done yet; there were old debts to repay in the land of the living. He couldn’t die yet!

It took him nearly an hour to stabilise himself this time. He had to cut back on distant projections; the further he went, the longer he was gone, and the more he exerted himself, the harder it was to keep himself tethered. 

He floated down to the floor in the very depths of his lair, in the vast cavern not even his most favoured minions had ever been granted access to. It was his hoard, diminished as it was compared to what he’d once had before that accursed, treasonous snake threw him into that dimensional tear that led to him crash-landing on Earth. 

His ephemeral hand reached out and touched the most precious thing in his Lair, a spectral palm flat against the monochrome scales of what had once been his body. The tether strengthened slowly, proximity to his body helping the process along. His disembodied mind was free to wander around, but his Spirit and soul were imprisoned within his Body.

It was the only way to survive the final century. A stasis ritual that killed him, but kept him from truly dying. Casting that ritual on this mana-deprived world would not have been beyond his ability by itself, but ensuring it would persist through the final century very much was. Making it happen despite that consumed his most prized possession: the Greater Favour the System owed him for beating back an Incursion many millennia ago. 

His faceless head tilted up, seeing without eyes as his body curled up like a fresh hatchling. His once brilliant, blazing scales that glimmered in every shade of red and orange were grey and dead, and the eyes that once shone like twin suns were closed. The only thing that remained the same was its size, still colossal as it should be for one of the oldest living Dragon Lords in existence.

He would have laughed once had anyone suggested he’d be reduced to such a pathetic extent. Alas, he wasn’t laughing now. That treasonous wyrm even stole his title, and that was an offence that even a slow, agonising death couldn’t repay. He had made that accursed title; he’d forged it through his own effort and made the System recognise it. It was his by every right, old or new, that mattered. 

However, all that depended on the mortals he’d tasked with retrieving all the reagents he would need for his resurrection. The ritual would have been much more demanding had he been truly dead, but while the stasis ritual was still going strong, that would never come to pass. With the System itself ensuring it, he had nothing to worry about on that front.

His greatest worry was slipping into a dreamless slumber and not being ready to enact the ritual once the mortals gathered everything he needed. He couldn’t trust anyone but himself to handle the resurrection ritual. 

It was galling to have to rely on weak, Rank 1 mortals even for the reagent-gathering part of the process, but he had no choice. If he wasn’t back to full strength by the time the Realm Barrier fell, he had little doubt that his old friend would take notice of him despite all his anti-divination countermeasures and come to finish the job he’d failed at so long ago. 

It was why he put no penalties on failure into that Quest he’d just given out. If the mortals failed, they would die, not because he would kill them, but because he wouldn’t be in a state to tear the betrayer apart when he inevitably came to finish him off. 

The upstart had never been one for restraint, so it was in little doubt that most of everyone on the continent would be little more than ash by the time he was done.

That would be punishment enough.