BOOM
Every swipe of the guard’s paw made the ground shake and tore leaves from the dark trees.
“Sehun, got a plan?” Rafael asked, straining, after holding off another blow.
“I’m thinking,” I answered, dodging the beast’s jaws again.
Unlike the servants, the guard was over three meters long and much heavier. It was a bear, or had been a bear before the corruption painted its eyes yellow, and it had too much health for the pack strategy to work.
“You’d better think fast, Mr. Sehun!” Sun begged.
“You wouldn’t have another active skill hidden in there, would you, boy?”
“No, sir!”
TSK
No clever twist. It’ll have to be brute force. I hated brute force. It was the plan of people with no plan, and I had spent my whole life making fun of people like that.
At least there were only two, not twelve. I knew I could kill mine, given time. I didn’t know if Rafael could hold his for that long.
SHSHSHSHSHSHSHSH
In the middle of my math, the whispers started running through the trees again, closer.
“SEHUN!” shouted Rafael.
“I know!”
That was when, in the near-total darkness, a golden glow came from a small, fragile girl and lit up the clearing. I tightened my grip on the spear and felt my strength and speed rise a little.
The bear wasn’t so lucky. The corruption that turned its eyes yellow and its fur black seemed to falter, and its aggression dropped.
A blessing? I looked at her over my shoulder. Is that really Lili? Her magic is so light.
I opened the status screen.
[Name: Kai Sehun]
[Level: 1]
[Class: ???]
[Tier 1: Umbra Initiate]
[Strength: 12 (+2)]
[Dexterity: 11 (+1)]
[Intelligence: 15]
[Vitality: 9]
[Tenacity: 6]
[Luck: 8]
[Umbra: 1]
[Positive status: Blessing of Micael (+2 Strength, +1 Vitality, +1 Dexterity)]
That much? The difference scared me. At level 1, that was worth weeks of hunting.
Micael. The name bothered me. The Curators registered every holy healing in the name of some god, and the system obeyed. The talent was hers. The name on the screen wasn’t.
Contrary to common sense, a priest doesn’t always wear a white robe and have a good heart. Religious classes have tangled paths and depend on the nature of whoever receives them. Just as there are evil gods, there are evil priests. A blessing depends on the summoned’s talent, and it can take as much as it gives, the way the servants of the gods of destruction do.
I kept looking at that clean glow and thought about the line in the index. One didn’t match the other, and that wouldn’t leave me alone.
SHSHSHSSHSHSH
“Sehun, we need to finish this and keep moving.”
“Relax. I’ll take care of it real quick.”
Small stuff for a lot of people, but added to what the souls had given me, my attributes already matched those of someone at level 3. With my skills, that bear had stopped being a problem and become an opportunity.
The guard reared its heavy body to hit me with its paw. I ducked, slid across the damp earth and passed underneath it. Big as it was, it was slow to turn, and the Hsu Quandao went into the rear joint, exactly the one it used as a pivot to turn.
With no pivot, it lost its balance. I kept up the attack and cut the joint of the other leg too. The spear’s blade, with more than fifteen points of strength behind it, went into the thick hide without meeting resistance.
Big beast, slow turn. Stay behind it and hit the legs. First-day lesson.
If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
On the other side, Rafael had gotten better too. With the extra strength, he was no longer being pushed back and was even landing a few straights to the monster’s jaw, worthy of the national boxing champion he had been.
SHSHSHSHSSHSHSHSHHSHHS
With the whispers getting closer and closer, I cut my guard’s throat and ran to help Rafael. You could almost see the bear’s indignation at being attacked by two at once. When the second one fell, we ran without stopping, away from whatever that was. There wasn’t even time to collect the souls, which hurt me more than I’d admit out loud. Two Elite+ souls left on the ground. It was like dropping a pile of gold in the middle of the road.
We only stopped when our legs gave out, far enough away not to hear anything anymore.
[EXP +10 x2]
[Nightmare Mode x2]
[EXP +40]
“I’m… I’m sorry.” Sun was trying to catch his breath, hands on his knees. “I can only make fire once an hour. Good thing Lili came.”
“You’re helping. You’re doing your part. Worry about what you can do.”
“He’s right,” said Rafael. “But what now? If something stronger than that comes, I can’t hold it.”
“I don’t think anything will. I’ve figured out what kind of dungeon this is. The last ones were Elite+. On a low floor, even on Nightmare, the only thing stronger than that is the guardian.”
“You know a lot about this place, Mr. Sehun,” Sun remarked.
“More or less. My knowledge is limited.” I turned to Lili. “Thanks for the blessing, Lili. I don’t know if we’d have made it without you.”
“Li… li?” It was the first thing she’d said since we came in. “Who’s Lili?”
The three of us looked at one another.
“Your name is Lili. You didn’t know?”
“No. How do you know, sir?”
“It must be on your status screen. Just say ‘open status screen.’”
She repeated it without any intonation, the way you repeat a password. Her dull eyes wandered over the screen without stopping anywhere. She couldn’t read. I leaned in to see the first line.
“Lili Ferrer,” I read out loud. “That’s your name.”
“Name.” She touched the word in the air with the tip of her finger, unable to really touch it. “This one didn’t know she had a name.”
I heard the muscles in Rafael’s hand tighten, his nails digging into his palm.
“You don’t have parents?” he asked.
“N-no.”
I touched his arm before he hurt himself. Only then did I realize everyone was waiting for me to say something, and I had no idea what.
I knew how to command ten thousand people. I didn’t know how to talk to a child.
“You can stay with us,” I said, and the sentence came out stiff, like a contract clause. I tried to fix it. “I mean, if you want. After this. We don’t bite. Well, Rafael looks like he bites, but it’s just the face.”
“Just the face,” Rafael confirmed, dead serious, and unclenched his hand.
Sun looked at the ground. Lili kept staring at me without blinking.
“This one can?”
“You can. All three of you can.” It was easier to say it to the three of them than just to her. “Right now we’re inside the tower, but out there almost everything must have changed already. Nothing will be the way you knew it until a few days ago.”
“What do you mean, Sehun?” asked Sun.
“You’ll understand.”
SHSHSHSHSHSHSHSHSH
“Let’s go. If we want to get out alive, we have to defeat the guardian here.”
“You think we can?” Rafael asked. “We almost lost to the guards. Going by the names, we’re going to have to face this Guardian of the Black Forest, right?”
“It would be a bigger problem if it weren’t corrupted. Given the state we found the servants in, I doubt the Guardian is any better.”
“Still.”
“Relax.” I looked at Lili. “I have a plan.”
[Guardian of the Black Forest]
[Health: 3000/3000]
[Grade: Lord]
[Status: Corrupted - Intelligence reduced, Strength increased, Health increased, Resistance increased]
“Three thousand health!” Sun exclaimed, hidden in the brush. “Sehun had better be right.”
After a few more minutes of walking, we had reached a clearing in the middle of the forest. In it, a gigantic boar, more than three meters tall, lay on the dry grass. Its white fur was covered in dark moss, and it grunted in pain. Behind it, stacked up, sat two old wooden chests and a gleaming silver chest.
I had told everyone the plan. There was resistance, mainly from Rafael, but we ended up agreeing it was the best alternative. Or the only one.
“Makes sense we didn’t find anything along the way,” Rafael said, almost to himself. “The treasures were here.”
“What a beautiful animal.” Sun was completely ignoring the chests. “Its white isn’t white, it’s ivory with a bluish undertone, like snow in the morning. Too bad it’s like this.”
“Yeah, it’s a shame,” Rafael agreed. “That said, I hope Sehun’s right. Otherwise I don’t know what we do.”
A few dozen meters from there, I stood on the trail, unarmed, not moving a finger. Lili waited at the entrance to the clearing. After a few minutes, the whispers began.
SHSHSHSHSHSHSHSH
I stayed still.
Not yet.
With every second the sound got louder and closer.
Not yet.
The nearest leaves began to shake hard.
Not yet. Pull all of them. If one gets left behind, it’s theirs to deal with.
When the source of the whispers appeared, I was already running.
Without the weight of the spear, I was faster than usual, and I needed to be.
Snakes?
[Unknown Corruption]
[Health: 100/100]
[Grade: Unknown]
[Status: Immune to physical damage]
The corruption was shaped like snakes and had little health individually. The problem was something else.
A hundred? Two hundred?
Fragile or not, their number and speed made them impossible to face in close combat. Immune to physical damage, so there was no point even trying.
I hope I’m right. Otherwise, this’ll be the shortest comeback in history.
I ran toward the clearing, and the mass of snakes didn’t fall back even a meter. If it had been just a little faster, it would already have caught me. Soon I spotted Lili, her eyes still dull. Despite the danger, she hadn’t questioned the task even once. She had agreed to go first without blinking, like someone who has been sent ahead many times.
That bothered me more than the snakes.
“Lili! Get ready!”
She pressed her hands together and began to call up the blessing, the same one that had weakened the corruption earlier.
Work. Please, work.
Nearby, Sun was preparing Ignite.
When I got close to Lili, I used Shadow Emergence to jump two meters and stop beside her. The golden glow of the blessing formed a circle around the two of us, and when the corruption touched the light, it began to burn.
“Sun, now!”
The boy dragged the brush across the palette and flung the drops of red paint upward. They swelled in the air and fell into the middle of the snakes.