A Lesson and a Boon

  Floor 3: Tides of War

  Ground appeared underneath me, hard and unforgiving. It slammed into me, causing a jolt of agony to run through my body. I cried out. The world blurred.

  I rolled over, which felt weird given the fact that I didn’t have an arm to impede my progress. Normally there was the bump up, the hesitation, and the descent onto my back. Instead of that I just turned like a half-frozen chicken on a spit. Or like one of those rolls of steel that could turn a person to pasta puree in a split second flat. Either way, the feeling was unfamiliar.

  The world did a dilating camera action before coming into focus on four rather familiar faces looking down at me. I groaned. Great, not these people again. Not right now when I was half dead and waltzing my way further down that six feet each second I wasn’t being treated by a professional. Soon I would begin to thaw, and when that happened… you get the idea.

  It was Vicious and his gang again, back to harass me and finish removing my spleen. Well unfortunately for them, that particular organ was likely mush already. Dalia had done quite the number on my body in that last fight, not to mention I still wasn’t completely healed from my encounter with the An Dreores, and further, from the treant before that. But those injuries were a moot point by now. I was basically a walking corpse.

  Vicious sneered. “Look who it is, boys. It’s the twink from the first floor. Looks like he made it this far after all.”

  His fellow, the other man from the Useless Space Boys—I couldn’t for the life of me remember their actual guild name, but I still remembered that little moniker—stepped forward. “Look at those wounds. What do you think he ran into, a rabbit?”

  The two of them laughed. The two blue-stripes chuckled half-heartedly along with them.

  I let out a low groan and sat up, rubbing at my banged-up nose with my remaining hand, whatever good that did. That arm was basically useless as well. I was just lucky I had fallen onto my face instead of my shoulder where the metal bit was embedded.

  My head swiveled from side to side, marking out my surroundings for dangers other than the four behind me. Darkness shrouded the world. If I had to say, it was pre-dawn, but just barely. Four, maybe five in the morning? That was just a guess, not a statement. I was pretty rusty at telling the time from the position of the heavens. Besides, the stars were different in the dungeon. It was slowly getting more of a gray color in the east, though, so that was an indicator of sorts.

  I was in a camp. No, I was in between two camps. There was a wide divide between the two, like a street. It was compacted and dead, with stray bits of brittle, yellow grass sticking up every once in a while.

  Lanterns were posted every dozen yards or so, casting flickering lights on the shadowed ground. Their forms flared bright every once in a while, making little clinking sounds and swinging on their poles. I identified one of them.

  Sparkbit Lantern

  Sparkbits are small, firefly-like creatures that hop around on the edges of magically created fires. They are fairly harmless, and extinguish quite quickly unless placed in a container. Sparkbits are rumored to bless their keepers with a little bit of extra luck, but so far nobody can prove it. This is a Sparkbit in a lantern—one of the weakest containers for keeping them alive, just higher than the candle and the lamp. It will last for no more than two days.

  Huh. That explained the excess swinging. The Sparkbits probably weren’t too happy being all cooped up.

  There was no wind out, thankfully. I had had enough of that for at least the next week. Nor was it too cold. It was a balmy… oh, I didn’t know. My internal thermometer was going haywire saying it was far hotter than it should be, but my wounds hadn’t opened up yet so I knew it couldn’t be that warm.

  The four men continued laughing at my expense. I examined them as well.

  Human(Lvl 9)

  Baneful Mercenary(Lvl 11)

  Human(Lvl 8)

  Human(Lvl 9)

  They were all on the upper end of tierless and the lower of Initiate tier, the lowest of them being one level above my own. Vicious was the only one who had ascended at all, probably with a trail of bloody footsteps behind him. I did not like the sound of that ‘Baneful’ precursor. At all. It sounded sinister.

  Myself, I had yet to parse through my notifications, and I wouldn’t do it quite yet. While these four were less dangerous than Dalia had been, due to their lack of mortal aggression and classes, there were still more of them.

  They were taking turns making caustic remarks about my state and my mother and my intact virginity. It didn’t really bother me that much. In fact, it was rather amusing watching them work themselves up over nothing.

  But all that stopped when the portal flashed. A younger boy stumbled out. He was frosted at the tips—dark brown hair sticking up and frozen solid, wispy teenage attempt at a mustache coated with powdered snow, frigid sweat making his stiffened clothes creak and crackle. Overall, the boy looked as though he had been tossed in the polar plunge and then walked half a mile through the northern wastelands. He gasped in relief, breath coming out in steamy puffs.

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  “Woo! That was really cold.” He muttered, chafing at his arms with hands that curled into light fists if their tension was ever released. “That was some spell back there. Whatever cast it had to be at least Initiate tier. Didn’t think I’d see one of those on the second floor. Changed the whole environment, it did. Turned it straight to glasss. An alpine forest changed to iced-over arctic tundra in a few short hours.” He shook his head.

  “Eh,” I said, “Not so much. If it was, the devastation would have been much worse. It was that Moonkissed Ritualist you got the notification about. She was level nine.”

  The boy blinked at me owlishly. He looked at my missing arm, then the pieces of debris sticking out of my body. Then his mind caught up and he started. “Holy… you’re that tough bastard we heard so much about? The one who single-handedly took that thing down? The Ice Conqueror?”

  Ding

  New Title Acquired: Ice Conqueror

  I stared at the new notification. What on earth? What had the ghost been doing? I could have sworn he didn’t have time to go spreading that around. What was going on?

  “Ice Conqueror? Really? That was barely three hours ago. How did the story even get out in that amount of time?”

  The boy shook his head. “It’s been nearly half a day since it happened. Man, you’re seriously out of it. Are you okay?”

  “For now, maybe.” I grunted. “But I’m going to thaw out here soon and then… not so much. Are you sure it’s been that long? I went into that portal a little over three hours after killing her and I haven’t been out of it for more than fifteen minutes.”

  He just shook his head again. I noticed he had a tendency to do that. It was like a nervous tick.

  “Hmph. Well, then you’re probably right. I must have wandered for longer than I thought. What’s your name?”

  “Josh. You?”

  “I’m Felix.” I said, then hauled myself to my feat with a very unsteady grunt. I held out my hand to him. It was covered in frost and frozen mud. A trail of bright red blood wandered its way down my arm from my shoulder and dripped from my wrist. “Well, Josh, I’d hate to take up any more of your time, especially since we seem to have bewildered these four fine gentlemen. I’ll need to un-bewilder them before long. Have you chosen a side yet?”

  He shook my hand heartily with a shiver. “Yeah, I have actually! I got recruited by the Intrepid Explorers guild back on the first floor. You?”

  I snorted. So that was their name. Nothing said pretentious like Intrepid Explorers. What kind of guild names themselves intrepid anyways? Ah well. “They tried doing that back on the first floor. Didn’t take. Though I suppose I might have to do something about that now. Wouldn’t want to end up starting a war with both sides by beating their recruiters to a bloody pulp.”

  Josh looked around me and at Vicious with a raised eyebrow. He, rightfully, looked confused. “Not that I want to question the greatness of the Ice Conqueror, but could you beat them up? That looks like a bit of a tough fight even for a new Initiate.” He looked me up and down. “Doesn’t look like you’re a new Initiate to me.”

  “You’re probably right. And I’m half dead at the moment anyways. Still, this was approximately the same condition I was in when I shoved half a shield straight through that level nine’s chest. As a bonus, I was level five at the time. Though, she wasn’t very tanky, so that probably had something to do with how easily the shield bypassed her spine.”

  He stared at me mutely for a moment, then decidedly ignored what I had just said in favor of examining the four behind me again. “Level eleven Baneful Mercenary, huh? Sounds delightful. I’ll leave you to your fate. Hey blue-balls!” He spoke over my shoulder to one of the striped guys. “Which one of these here camps is the one for the Intrepid Explorers, huh?”

  The man on the far right jolted and looked at Josh stupidly. “Uh… It’s that one. Over there.” He pointed to a seemingly random side where I could only barely see a flag waving. It was completely black, but I supposed there might be a gold star on it in the daylight.

  “Thanks!” Josh said, and sauntered off in that direction. He was mostly defrosted by this point, and he left a trail of water droplets on the ground behind him. I was willing to bet they would still be cold.

  That was quite the personality the man had.

  I turned back to my assailants from the first floor. They were staring at the man, slack-jawed, completely bewildered and utterly lost. They probably hadn’t even heard what we had been talking about.

  That was fine. I didn’t need to inform them about what was going on a floor beneath. And though the boy’s adamance that I had killed Dalia a full twelve hours ago was a bit concerning, it wasn’t worth worrying about right now.

  “Well,” I said, “What are you staring at?”

  That seemed to shake them from their stupor, and they glanced over at me. Vicious sneered wordlessly, hand moving to his knife. The others just blinked.

  “What was that?” One of them demanded.

  I waved the question off. “I was just having a conversation. What do you mean?”

  This indifference was going to get me in trouble, but at this point, I was too tired to care. I was half dead, I had just learned that there was a blossoming legend about me within twelve hours of my leaving the floor(apparently), and now I had to deal with a quartet of men who had not just threatened but actively attempted to remove my spleen back on the first floor. I was well past the point of stopping. And you know what, I was past the point of dealing with them, too.

  “Tha—”

  I flattened the man’s sentence with one of my own, channeling my inner Josh. “Right,” I pointed at one of the Royal Badgers, “I have decided I’ll be joining your side for the duration of this floor. Now, I’ll need to see a healer immediately, but after that I don’t particularly care. Just give me a hot meal and we’ll be square. Got it? Good.”

  Turning, I strode off towards the camp in the opposite direction of where Josh had gone. Or, well, I tried to. My leg was still busted up real good, so I couldn’t do more than hobble. I still had no idea where this side of me had come from, but I was out of patience. The only reason I hadn’t chosen the Useless Space Boys was because I didn’t like Vicious. That was the whole of my reasoning at the moment.

  A pair of knives slammed into the wood beside my head as I passed one of the lantern poles. It stuck there, quivering wildly. I paused, looking back over my shoulder to see Vicious and his friend pulling out a second knife each.

  “I really think you should reconsider,” Vicious said. Then, as calmly as though he were cutting an apple, he reached up and slit the throat of one of the recruiters for the Royal Badgers.

  Blood slopped out in a mess like a popped water balloon. It splattered onto the packed earth, spraying droplets of dark crimson onto the clothing and faces of the two wild-eyed men. The dry ground absorbed the man’s life in moments, leaving nothing but an empty, dessicated corpse collapsed boneless to the ground.

  The dead man’s friend opened his mouth to scream or protest or gasp in horror—any one of them, really—but he never managed it. All he managed was a horrid gurgle as Vicious’ friend jammed a knife into his belly and quite literally unzipped him from stern to stem. Viscera and blackened bile joined the blood on the barren ground and the man collapsed in a twitching fit, the life rapidly leaving his eyes.

  Shows how much the numbers really help, doesn’t it?