Her eyes shot open just in time to see the rusted tip of a curved dagger descending right towards her stomach. The familiar fear of death, of being this close to something sharp pointed right at her made her freeze and that would have been all the gleeful goblin covered in a dark cloak would have needed to end her life.
Her Amulet flared to life, an opaque film of pink energy appearing and cracking under the dagger’s power. Shadowy energy suffused it and sent another round of web-like cracks through it as Mia’s thoughts slowly caught up with the present.
I’m going to die. She realised. It wasn’t a fresh thought, but one she’d had a number of times already and she felt a touch silly just thinking it. Maybe Clive had been right, and she was already slowly but surely starting to get used to almost-dying.
Was this going to be it? Was this going to be another almost-death, or the real deal? Was she going to die to a goblin, of all things? Metres away from her friends and family?
No.
She moved, a hand snapping up driven more by instinct than thought and grabbed a wiry green pair of wrists just as her Amulet finally failed, once again searing her skin right between her collarbones as a final ‘fuck you’.
Mia gritted her teeth at the pair, then hissed in pain as the goblin’s knife sank through her shirt and drew blood.
Her Kinetic Energy Assimilation turned up to full crank, helping out her pathetic Strength that a four foot tall goblin assassin easily overpowered by drinking up a good third of the force bearing down on her.
Mia thought with a frantic need for a solution, near panicking. Oh, fuck, she was panicking, or was pretty close to it. Think.
Spells wouldn’t work, she could barely make a cohesive thought and it took all her willpower to just force her trembling muscles to keep the goblin from pushing its dagger right into her guts.
Guts. I could survive that long enough to drink an Elixir. Mia thought, then realised she was an idiot and screamed. “HELP!”
The goblin above her let out a cackle, muffled by its dark scarf. Then it spoke, it spoke words that Mia belatedly realised she could understand as Imperial Common. “Dumb elf-thing. You are under my silence-Ward. No one will hear your screams.”
The wave of relief she felt at the realisation that Carmilla would come at any moment to rip the little shit to shreds turned to ash in her mouth, sending a renewed wave of dread down her spine. She was locked in here, not heard by anyone, alone with a goblin. She was going to die.
The fear turned into anger, a blinding fury like someone flipped a switch inside her head. Mana answered her fury, raw and angry like her it came, flowing out of all ten of her fingers clasping the goblin’s wrists.
She screamed her rage at him, her whole body shaking under the exertion as crackling pink energy, utterly wild and uncontrolled came running like a runaway current.
The goblin screamed along with her, its voice a hint of surprise at first, then sheer agony as skin and flesh turned to nothing as arcane power tore its arms to shreds.
It recoiled, pulling back from Mia, but she didn’t let go, maybe she couldn’t, even if she had wanted to. Not that she did. Something gave, just as Mia clamped down on her mana again as the threat to her life was gone, the goblin’s arms tore at the elbow.
Her energy channels ached at the exertion, her previously full pool of mana now down to 80% again after that stunt. Spitting raw mana out through her fingers for self defence had proven to be extremely effective, but also just as draining on her mana. Spells existed for a reason, after all, and that reason was efficiency.
The goblin scrambled away, backing into a dark corner of the courtyards, with two stumps where it once had arms and fearful anger dancing in its dark eyes. “I will have your ears strung up on my necklace for that, elf-thing.”
It then melted into the shadows of a crevice, and to Mia’s horror, its repulsive presence disappeared from her Spirit Sense. Her ears twitched, the noise of the world around her returning with a snap as the Ward disappeared.
I can’t hear it. Mia thought, chewing on her cheeks as her heart beat like a drum. Her gaze jumped around, from cracking twigs to rustling leaves and distant conversations, but found no sight of the goblin.
She sat there, panting heavily, holding a pair of now-skeletal arms that only still had flesh and skin around the tips of the fingers.
When she moved to throw them away, the majority of it turned to ash, flowing through her fingers as a few remaining fragments clattered down the ground.
“Help?” Mia tried again between two ragged wheezes, looking around a bit. If the silencing Ward the goblin spoke of was still up, she’d have to get out of it asap. She shouldn’t have worried though.
“MIA?” Carmilla was the first to sense something was amiss, practically teleporting next to the still shuddering and panting Mia. “What happe-“
The vampire’s nose twitched, a soft grimace flickering across her face before her eyes narrowed and snapped to the discarded pair of hands and rusted dagger a few metres away from Mia.
Before anyone else came over the vampire let out a soft growl, pouncing on the pair of arms and snatching them up. Then she … bit off one of the fleshy fingertips. She made a gagging sound, but shook it off with a grimace before snapping her hand out in a random direction and sending off a Blood Lance without any further warning.
She just ate the finger of a goblin. What.
The spell bore through some rubble, then earned a brief, but loud scream of agony that sounded just like the goblin assassin’s to Mia’s ears.
“Got you,” Carmilla murmured, a cold grin on her face before it all gave way to worry as she hurried back to Mia. “Are you alright? Did it injure you?”
“A bit,” Mia said, wincing and slumping in relief as Carmilla’s comforting presence wrapped around her like a warm hug. “Nothing too bad … I think. I almost got a heart attack though. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuckk.”
Another shudder ran through her body. She poked a finger through the hole in her shirt, then pulled its collar down to check on the burn mark under the Amulet.
Then pulled up the bottom of the shirt to check on her midriff and winced again as she felt blood making the fabric cling to her skin.
“You should drink an Elixir,” Carmilla said, grabbing the nearby fanny pack Mia had her potions stored in. “My Combat Logs say that thing was a level 11 Goblin Shadestalker. It might have coated its blade in poison.”
Mia reached for her pack in a hurry, the idea of being poisoned not even having crossed her mind. Her fingers shook though, the terror of the fight and her still maybe-impending death proving too much.
“I’ll help,” Carmilla said, opening the zipper and grabbing the first vial she got her fingers on. The rest of the team only started streaming back and huddling around Mia and Carmilla in confused worry as the vampire popped the lid of the vial and held it to Mia’s lips.
Mia’s lips curved at the edges as she thought back to her first time meeting the vampire. It had been just, what? Two weeks ago? Around there somewhere, and yet it felt like months.
Likely a side effect of all the stress of having her life in varying levels of danger through it all, levels that never quite reached zero or anywhere close to it.
Still, going from being terrified of that strange, skeletal redheaded girl she found half-dead in a pile of corpses, she went all the way to being comforted by her mere presence.
Carmilla had been crying in relief in Mia’s arms back then, and as the vampire held her shoulders now, Mia almost reenacted that moment of theirs with their roles reversed.
I’m alive. Mia thought, repeating the words to herself for a few times until they finally sunk in. Her muscles went lax, and she slumped in Carmilla’s hold just as the wounds on her body healed with an intense itchiness. Fuck.
Staring down an arrow headed for her head and almost getting her guts spilled out by a snickering goblin were not the same, not by a longshot. The first, she was over in just moments but she suspected she wouldn’t dare fall asleep ever again without a Familiar around to keep watch.
This experience was going to linger. As would the lesson it taught her: don’t fall asleep in a rift without adequate preparations. Though, just to make sure, Mia wanted to make that a general rule outside of a rift too as soon as possible.
With a final shudder, Mia opened her eyes with a steely light glowing in their depths. She was alive, and that was the most important thing there was. The second place went to making sure she’d never fall to the same mistake.
No more sleeping in rifts with only dubiously talented teammates keeping watch. Alert Ward wasn’t a spell she was planning to learn, but maybe it’d be just what she needed to keep this from happening again.
I never, ever want to wake up with a knife pointed at me again.
“I’m good,” Mia said, leaning on Carmilla a little to rise to her feet. “Anything new while I was sleeping? … Also, did you really just eat that goblin’s finger? Isn’t monster meat supposed to be, like, really bad for you?”
Carmilla looked back at her weirdly, then comprehension bloomed on her face as she shook her head. “A vampire’s bloodline purity goes up if they drink high quality blood, the damage a single finger did to it won’t even take a single drop of your blood to undo.”
Mia felt slightly relieved, that worry for the vampire that wormed its way into her heart at the sight of her biting off the digit from the detached arm fading.
Her thoughts turned back to her other question, and to the rising irritation of her friends whom she trusted to protect her while she slept. The friends who would have been none the wiser if the goblin had managed to kill her, happily ambling around just metres away from her while she fought for her life.
She glanced over at the walls surrounding the courtyard, then up at the spot where her Phalanx had been. It was gone, of course it was. Even with half of her mana fed into it, the spell was only going to last at most a dozen minutes.
Maybe I should have gone with Aegis. It wouldn’t be mobile either, but it’d take at most a fifth of my mana for an initial cast and I could feed it more to keep it running.
Phalanx had been the answer to her constant and repeatedly hammered in need for a strong defensive spell. It was the best there was, the book even having mentioned that a peak Rank 0, it should be able to block even a single peak Rank 1 spell.
“Nothing much,” Brent said as the man came over. “Just a few hobgoblins poking their heads out of the keep that didn’t live long. Or so we thought … I’m- I apologise. I said we’d keep watch over you while you rested but that goblin slipped past us somehow.”
The little bit of indignation Mia felt at the team’s failure at keeping her safe evaporated as Brent bowed his head with a grimace. Putting herself into his shoes and swapping the one ambushed by the goblin out with Lina in her head, Mia felt a horrible guilt gnawing at her guts.
Mia couldn’t blame him. Thinking more about it, she lost track of the Shadestalker the moment it did its weird shadow-blending magic. Both her Spirit Sense and her prodigious hearing had been proven ineffective.
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
With Mia being the second best spotter in the team after Carmilla, the only person she could have expected anything but a failure similar to her own was the vampire.
Glancing over, she saw that the redheaded girl came to the same conclusion, grimacing as she stared down at her feet.
“How did it get past you?” Mia frowned. “I’m … not angry, not really. But I’d really like to make sure we can avoid this happening again.”
Mia’s ears failing were easy to explain away with the silencing Ward the goblin had around it, and while her Spirit Sense’s failure was harder to explain, the strange lifeforce sense Carmilla supposedly had should not have failed to notice the intruder.
“I thought it was a bug,” Carmilla murmured, barely audible. She still had her gaze averted as she continued. “My perception’s range is minuscule, just a dozen metres around me. I use my sense of scent and hearing to spot stuff most of the time. I only passed by you once in the last fifteen seconds and when I did, I felt something, but thought it was just a strange bug.”
“Why?” Mia asked, befuddlement clear in her voice and while the rest of the team kept silent, their own confusion was clear in their eyes.
“It barely had any lifeforce,” Carmilla said, grimacing. “It felt … about as strong as a beetle. So I ignored it.”
“Okay?” Mia asked, blinking slowly. “How is that possible though, I thought lifeforce was just about proportional to the average between the three Main Attributes?”
Mia was more just wondering aloud than really asking a question, but Carmilla still tried to answer her question.
“Probably a stealth skill,” she said, then frowned. “But a Rank 1 Goblin really shouldn’t have any Skill even close to strong enough to mask their lifeforce like that.”
“It could also speak,” Mia said and that drew a number of wide eyes at her. “It was taunting me, in Imperial Common. And it also hid its presence from my Spirit Sense.”
“Could be a unique monster halfway through its metamorphosis,” Mark said thoughtfully, scrunching up his face as the group now turned on him. “I read the chance is astronomical, but sometimes a Rift or a Dungeon spawns a monster that’s not just the generic, factory made version of its type. These usually have a Unique Grade Primary Skill along with their base monster Class Skill.”
“And metamorphosis is that thing when monsters eat enough normal, non-broken mana to turn into … not-monsters?” Lina asked, a deep scowl on her face. “It’s spent its entire life inside the Rift though, it shouldn’t have had access to nearly enough mana.”
Could it go in and out as it pleased, just going out to kill and eat a few survivors before slipping back in? Mia wondered, but thinking back on it, she’d never once seen a monster walking back through the Rift portal while she’d been watching. Then … did someone try to dive this Rift before us and just failed? Ending up as that monster’s victims?
“How likely are we to stumble across another of these … Unique Monsters?” Brent asked, his lips drawn into a thin line.
“In this Rift?” Mark asked, shrugging. “Practically none. Finding just one is like winning the lottery.”
“Winning the lottery is supposed to be a good thing,” Helene said, frowning still as she watched over Mia like a hawk. “This is just … “
“Yeah …” Mark said, now visibly uncomfortable as his eyes darted over to where Carmilla had sent the Blood Lance and where the monster’s remains supposedly were. “Pretty … bad luck. Sorry Mia.”
Mia just waved him off, her thoughts still playing out scenarios where some unfortunate sods walked into the rift and ended up dying in this alien forest.
After shaking that off, Mia went to slip out of the ensuing debate and frantic planning for the ever-nearing dive into the keep. She tugged Carmilla aside, smiling softly at the clearly guilt stricken vampire and spent the next couple of minutes trying to calm the poor girl.
She succeeded, somewhat, and Carmilla was back to her usual aloof stoicism, but with a bit more brooding than before still mixed in.
I’ll take it as a win. Mia decided, taking to playfully bumping her hip into the vampire's whenever the girl seemed to sink too deeply into her thoughts. It always managed to snap the girl out of it, returning some much needed liveliness to her elegant features. She looks gorgeous without a smile, but a little blush and that slight smile is just … bliss.
*****
Mark ambled over to the piles of charred stuff that had once been a tent, a goblin or something other now-meaningless thing.
He had let Brent, Lina and Miss Vexley argue about the best plans and countermeasures moving forward with the four new additions to the team while he slipped away.
Hopefully unnoticed, but he really hoped that even if one or two of them kept track of him, they would write his leaving for the moment down as inconsequential.
For that, he had his most easygoing smile on as he strolled through the courtyard, looking for his target, his prize … and there it was, laying half-plastered across the rubble with jaws still open in a dead scream and eyes wide with the echoes of a torturous end still visible in them.
Mark swallowed, promising himself never to get on the bad side of the stupidly gorgeous redhead that Mia had somehow ensnared. He loved that girl like a sister, but damn, could she use some of her screws checked.
Dating a vampire. He understood it, he truly did. He was a man and had a perfectly healthy male urge to ogle every beautiful woman and if there was one worth ogling, it was Carmilla. Still a vampire.
Maybe it was Mark’s preference for women whom he didn’t have to step on three stools stacked atop each other to keep eye contact with that didn’t change even with him shrinking down to his new, dwarven height that kept his thoughts appreciative, but largely unconcerned with the beautiful woman. Yes, Carmilla was beautiful, but not Mark’s type, not anymore. Plus, she was far too aloof and broody for his liking, anyway he’d much rather spend a minute with that spunky waitress Kelly than an hour with the broody vampire. So he was wary, wary and honestly fearful for his friend’s wellbeing. There were very few accounts in the books he’d read — and he read them by the dozen once Zeigler gave them the go-ahead, and specifically looked up vampires — where falling for a vampire ended well for the non-vampiric side.
Mark read books, not just the practical guides for magic and such, but history books, encyclopaedias and such. Vampires did not have a good reputation in any of the Six Realms of the System. That had to say something about them.
Said books were also the reason he knew of Unique Monsters, and why he was out here, alone, trudging over to a goblin’s mangled corpse. They told him what he’d find, what made him call stumbling across a Unique Monster a ‘lottery win’. It was a good thing. No, it was a bloody damned miracle. Lady Fortune was not just smiling, but grinning down at them.
He kneeled down to the corpse, grabbed a pebble and fashioned it into a knife with his Earth Manipulation. He then cut it up with extreme care, going instantly for where he knew its core to be from all those corpses Brent made him dissect.
He cut around it, not daring to as much as clink his shoddy knife against the gem. Once he had it sufficiently freed from all ligaments greedily sticking to it, he reached in and ever so carefully removed it.
Cleaning it down a bit on his trousers, he quickly slipped the gem into the deepest part of his pocket and guided his Armaments armour to flow over it and lock it down.
He glanced at the new System Window that popped up and had to suppress a grin. If it wasn’t for that, one couldn’t have been faulted for mistaking the diminutive gem for the simple monster core it was practically indistinguishable from.
He wouldn’t have bothered with all this secrecy, this sneaking around if it weren’t for the four strangers they had on the team now. Mark trusted them only as far as Mia could throw them, which was exactly zero metres.
He also wouldn’t have bothered with this if the prize wasn’t so great. With even the System recognising it as such, it felt even more exhilarating.
[You have found a Skill Shard (Primary - Unique)]
[Primary Skill: Unknowable (Unique)]
Subskills:
- Stealth Specialist: Increases the potency and effectiveness of all Stealth related Skills and Spells by 200% + 100% per Rank
- Stealth Mastery: Mistakes made during actively attempting to blend in and / or hide from detection will be prevented by bursts of instinct.
- Unknowable: Your presence will be removed from all supernatural perception senses of anyone with a Spirit lower than yours.
- Effect is reduced by 10% for every 10% of your Spirit your foe has over yours.
- Effect is nullified when your foe has Spirit twice as large as yours.
[Do you wish to absorb this Skill Shard?]
[ERROR! You have 0 open Primary Skill slots, making instant absorption impossible.]
[Do you wish to send the Skill to your Skill Library for later use?]
[ Yes / No ]
“No,” Mark said under his breath, the sound of it muffled by his facial hair. He ran his fingers through it, a grin tugging at his lips as he ambled back over to the still bickering group while plastering an easygoing smile on his face.
He checked for the problematic ones, instantly relieved when he found the water-rogue, Chris leaning against a wall and animatedly disparaging the idea that she should go ahead to scout out the depths of the keep ahead of the party. If she was there, distracted, she couldn’t have been skulking about, catching a glimpse of Mark elbow deep in the goblin or his loot.
Next, he found Amelia, the army-sourced markswoman, standing with her back to him. Good. Those two were the ones rubbing him the wrong way, the most out of the lot. Army spooks, the both of them, here to keep watch on them and blast some of their brains out if they did something wrong, if his instincts were right.
Not that they would succeed, not in a million years. Mark thought grimly. They might take him out, maybe even Brent and perhaps even Miss Vexley if they ambushed her … but the vampire would tear them into tiny bite-sized chunks and make origami out of their intestines before they could do anything to her or Mia. Especially with that goblin ambush, Carmilla will be alert and hyper-focused on any such bullshit.
In contrast, Aiden was a fair cunt and liked fire and preening a bit too much, but he was more of an annoyance with his peacocking than anything else. Clive, on the other hand, was a nice bloke and Mark was coming to like him.
Still, he wouldn’t have risked a Skill Shard on that burgeoning liking that wasn’t even brushing on trust.
He idly tapped where the tiny, thumb-sized gem laid in his pocket, under a layer of hardened rock reinforced by his Armaments Subskill.
Forcing himself to keep from looking around like a kid that’d just raided his mom’s candy jar was an effort of mental fortitude and doing so, while keeping the easygoing smile and chatting like nothing was going on was even more so.
By their reactions, none of the four read the books he had and, as such, didn’t know how valuable a Unique Monster was. That could change later though, maybe when they researched some more about them.
Mark regretted telling the lot about Unique Monsters, just a bit. But he didn’t want him being miserly with information to cost them any stress just before a big fight.
However, he really didn’t want any one of them to be wondering ‘Didn’t Mark go wandering around back then?’ When they finally got around to reading up on Unique Monsters and their Skill Shards. That would lead to doubts, maybe them even wondering whether he had nabbed the Skill Shard. And whether they can take it from me. That Chris girl looks like she’d lose no sleep over slitting my throat for a Skill that’d fit her so well.
Still, this little stunt he’d pulled would pay dividends. Primary Skill Shards were an extreme rarity, only dropping from Unique Monsters and some other even more exotic and once in a century occurrences.
Skill Shards that only had a single Sub-Skill were less so, but they still supposedly only showed up as Dungeon and Rift Rewards from Rank 2 upwards.
Unique Monsters like the one he’d gotten the Shard in his pocket from never spawned with any consistency, they were always a one dive in a thousand, or even rarer. As for what the Shard itself being Unique entailed?
The grade was given to Skills that were non-upgradable. A Rare Skill could become Epic, then Legendary under the right condition, but a Unique Skill was fixed. No upgrades, not even with some crazy ultra rare Natural Treasure that would have turned a wimpy Common Primary Skill into a Legendary one. In return, some of their Subskills sometimes had unique powers, like the Unknowable Subskill of the one he’d palmed.
It wasn’t as over powered as it could have been, not by a long shot. Some Unique Skills were rumoured to have absolute powers, like what Unknowable would have been if it wasn’t restricted to working fully only on people with a lower Spirit than the user.
As for why he kept the extremely rare item in a place as easy to steal from as his pocket instead of sending it to his Skill Library, the System’s own impregnable storage?
He couldn’t take Skill Shards out of it. If he put it in there, the Skill Shard would be gone. Which wouldn’t be a problem if he actually wanted the thing for himself.
It was one thing that a stealth Skill meshed with his current Skill worse than oil and water, and another that he really, really … wasn’t feeling like getting another combat oriented Primary Skill when he finally reached Rank 1 and got a second Primary Skill slot.
He kept it close to heart, mostly, but Mark … hated fighting, he loathed it more and more with every new engagement where he felt the touch of death caressing the back of his neck.
The only time he’d actually felt like himself, like he was alive and doing something he loved ever since this whole apocalypse thing began was when he experimented with his skills, trained his Earth Manipulation and even more so than both when he used it to build.
He still remembered the pride he felt when he watched the hundreds metres long walls that’d kept Andritz safe from the horde of goblins. It was like nothing else, like he was a proud father watching over his child outshining his wildest hopes.
Just that the ‘child’ in question was a wall.
Well, maybe it was a dwarven thing. Not that it would make a difference, he was a dwarf now and that prideful thrill was a high he was craving more and more now that he knew it existed and was within reach.
It wasn’t a stretch to say that his new race gave him an impossibly huge rush of dopamine seeing a work of his proving to be up to par. If it made him capable of telling the chemical and magical composition of a rock just by licking it, why not that?
With this thing, they’ll be safe. Mark thought, glancing over at where Mia was playfully hip-checking her vampire girlfriend, much to the latter’s embarrassed confusion. Mark wanted to laugh, but held it in. He had to give it to them; they were pretty cute together. This will fit Carmilla pretty well once she gets to Rank 1. I’m guessing she’ll get some more expansive stealth related skills from her vampire bloodline, this Skill will help her a lot, I think.
But if she turns out to be problematic … like every damned book about vampires has warned me about, I can give this to Mia. With this, she should be able to run away and hide even from a vampire.
*****