Chapter 50: The Only Adventurers With a Negative Killcount

Misa stared at the wording of the skill, briefly speechless. The others went silent as well. It took a moment for them to process what it all meant — the wording of the skill was vague to begin with, and there were a lot of things it could mean, but the fact that it had merged with an artifact that was responsible for apparently shaping reality?

That was a little outside the scope of what they'd expected.

Misa was the first one to speak.

"Is this the reason I didn't die?" Misa said. Her words were soft, and she reached out to brush the edge of the box with a finger; the corners fizzled as she touched it. "When my village was attacked?"

"Perhaps it is the reason you were able to stabilize your village," Derivan offered quietly. "I do not know if it is the reason you were able to survive. The way you describe it..."

Derivan trailed off, like he was concerned his words would affect her. Misa shook her head. "Tell me," she said softly, but firmly.

Derivan nodded. "The way you described it before... your village was razed to the ground. Pieces of it survived, certainly, so perhaps there is a possibility there that that is the reason you were able to survive because of that. Perhaps if any part of your home survives at all, you will survive as well.

"But that skill is vague, and that seems to me a dangerous thing to assume. And if it does work that way, it may mean that any damage you sustain will propagate back to your village..."

Hardly a free pass to take damage or allow herself to be hurt, in other words. Misa grimaced a little as he spoke. She wasn't sure that this skill was helpful. Her bread and butter blocking skill required her to sacrifice part of her health, and if that damage propagated back to the village...

"You might be right," Misa said with a frustrated half-growl. "It's hard to say for sure unless we actually test out the skill, and it's taking a damn risk just to test it. And the description says there's an active component to it, but we have no way of knowing what that active component does, and the cost is another error message."

"Until we test it properly, yeah," Sev sighed. "We'll have to test a lot of things when we get back to the Guild, I think."

"At least we won't be doing it alone?" Vex piped up softly. Sev snorted and grinned at the lizard, ruffling his nonexistent hair, to Vex's yelps and protests. "You're just rubbing my head! It's weird!"

"Do you want me to stop?"

"...No. It's kind of nice."

Which was, obviously, a cue for Derivan and Misa to join in.

There was predictably quite a bit of chaos when they arrived back at the Guild.

Sev and his team had decided to go on ahead — they could move faster as a small group than the larger travel team that was lagging behind — and they decided to bring Kestel along with them, in case he needed the medical attention quickly. The lizardkin didn't say much when they explained the situation to him; he simply nodded, allowing Derivan to pick him up. The four adventurers glanced at each other, worried but not willing to voice out that worry in front of him.

So of course, the first thing the Guildmaster saw when they returned was Derivan standing with an incapacitated head researcher in his arms. She froze.

"Please tell me that's not who I think it is," she said. "Max is out right now. She used her skill again and vanished. So I'm assuming this isn't what it looks like, or she would definitely be here."

"It's the head researcher," Sev confirmed. "But uh... we didn't do this to him, if that helps?"

"That part I assumed," the Guildmaster said dryly. "Alright. We're bringing him to the temple. I'm coming with you." She walked briskly down the stairs to join them. "I'm assuming you came here to find me?"

"We came here to let you know there's a large group headed this way," Sev said, a little awkwardly. "The population of... an entire village. Also some of the research team."

"What." The Guildmaster froze for a moment, then let out a muttered curse, bringing up her system interface so she could start typing out commands rapidly. "What happened? Quick explanation, please. You can tell me in detail later."

"I resurrected my home village and they all need a place to stay," Misa volunteered.

The Guildmaster stopped walking.

"You did what." Her words were flat.

"I... resurrected my home village and they all need a place to stay?" Misa repeated, this time with a questioning sort of lilt at the end of the statement. She hadn't completely processed how ludicrous everything that had happened was yet, and...

...well, thinking about it, she really just wanted to go and talk to her parents. Stay with them for a day or two. She wasn't about to leave the team, but she missed them, she realized.

The Guildmaster still hadn't said anything, and it took her a moment before Misa realized it — she'd been too busy reminiscing. "Um. Guildmaster?"

"Explain," the Guildmaster said with a long-suffering note of pain in her voice. "I know I said quick explanation, but you've apparently broken all the rules we know of, so I'm going to need to know how you did this. Especially if it can be replicated. And how much Elyra knows about it. I'm shielding Kestel from hearing the details, although I'm not sure he can process much of it right now."

"Uh..." Misa exchanged glances with the rest of the team — who looked a little less surprised than she felt, so she was assuming she'd been the only one that hadn't particularly considered the potential political fallout.

Fuck that, though. It was her home. Why would she?

She explained what had happened in a little more detail to the Guildmaster as they continued to the temple, leaving out the details of the reality anchor for now, though she made it clear that she was skipping something. The general gist of the tale she told was that the dungeon had generated her old village from scratch, right down to every person that lived in her village. As far as she could tell, they were nearly the same as the real thing, with one difference.

Even the Guildmaster grimaced as she explained the details of how she'd been cut out of the lives of the villagers. It hadn't been done properly — it had left a hole. And though many of the villagers couldn't tell, Charise had the skills to feel the hole her daughter had left, every moment of every day.

"I couldn't just let the dungeon take them away from me again," Misa said quietly. "So I stopped it. The specifics are a little complicated, and I think it's probably best if we explained that when we have some privacy, but that's the gist of it."

"You just... stopped it." The Guildmaster rubbed the bridge of her nose slowly, which was rather monumental because Misa had the feeling that the only reason they'd seen her do that was because she'd allowed them to see her do it. That, or she was stumped enough to have forgotten about whatever skill she used to hide their perception of her actions. "You realize that's not something people can do."

"I did it," Misa said, a little lamely. The Guildmaster snorted.

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"You also know you're the only team to ever come back with a negative on the killcount," the Guildmaster said.

"I do now?"

"And does Elyra know about this?"

Misa hesitated.

"...I think it's best to assume that they do," she eventually said. "We didn't formally introduce the villagers to anyone who went back to Elyra or anything — the ones we did introduce them to are all coming here. But that doesn't mean that they don't know. The villagers are a pretty big group, and they're a pretty big group that came out of nowhere. Even if they don't know that they're necessarily resurrections..."

"They know to keep it quiet, I believe," Derivan added helpfully. "But many of them are frightened, and several of them are children. I concur with Misa; it is best to assume that Elyra knows."

"Fuck," the Guildmaster grumbled. "It'd be better for us if they don't. I'm hoping they don't. It'll be a lot harder to keep up security if Elyra's trying to get past our defenses all the time."

"You're going to help house them?" Misa asked, her voice hopeful.

"Of course we are," the Guildmaster said dismissively. "We have people that can build a village quick, no problem. It might not be in the best shape to start with, but we can always improve it over time. Besides..."

The Guildmaster paused here, and her voice turned soft, regretful.

"...The fact of the matter is that the Guild failed your village," she said. "We cannot help every village out there, but we try to remember all the ones we fail. J'rokksur is on that list, and it is not a failure I have forgotten."

Misa was silent for a moment, staring at the Guildmaster. She'd never met the woman, she was pretty sure. But there was a nagging feeling at the back of her mind that maybe she had...

It was difficult to say, considering the kind of skills the Guildmaster had. But she thought maybe she could remember someone indiscernible that she'd met two years ago, when she'd been at the peak of her self-destructive phase. She'd been consumed by the loss of her home, and a stranger had given her a purpose.

A small one. A relatively useless one, even. Who the fuck asked people to clear out basement rats? But then she'd actually gone into the damn basement, because what else was she supposed to do, and the rats had been... well, enormous.

Adrenaline was the feeling she'd felt back then, and it hadn't been exactly what she'd needed. It was what came afterwards — when the owner of that house thanked her, thinking she was from the Adventurer's Guild and paying her, and reminding her remarkably of her mom —

"Did you set me up?" Misa demanded. "All those years ago. To join the Adventurer's Guild."

"I did not," the Guildmaster replied dryly, glancing at Misa. "But if I did, I wouldn't tell you."

...Well, she was honest, at least.

"What's more important is what we're going to do about J'rokksur," the Guildmaster said. "Even if we can hide them for now, it's not going to last forever — an entire village appearing is something that's going to show up on the Kingdom's radars. It doesn't sound like what you did can be replicated — gods forbid the dungeons are hard enough to understand as it is — but that doesn't mean people won't want to try."

"Elyra will want to try the most, I think," Vex said quietly. "Anderstahl is less interested in dungeons."

"That is likely," the Guildmaster agreed. "I'm anticipating the most trouble from Elyra, and Elyra has its own problems right now."

"The food thing," Misa said with a frown. "Is it that bad?"

"It's getting worse," the Guildmaster said with a sigh. "Food production in Elyra barely keeps even with its population to begin with. They had a stockpile they managed to build up, especially with people that had the relevant skills, but now even that stockpile is starting to decay — the [Preservation] spells they're using are failing, and they don't know why."

"Is magic just failing there?" Sev wondered aloud, and Vex paled at the thought.

"A lot of things in Elyra are run by magic," he said, sounding worried. But he shook his head a second later. "I don't know. If all magic was affected... a lot more systems would be collapsing. A lot more than just the food, at any rate."

"We're headed to Elyra next anyway, right?" Misa said. "We can investigate it then."

"I'm not sure that it's exactly our job," Sev grumbled.

"Oh, I can make it your job," the Guildmaster said brightly.

"What." Sev's voice was almost as flat as the Guildmaster's had been when she'd been told about the entire village being brought back.

"How would you like to be the Guild's official delegation?" the Guildmaster grinned. "We need to send people to Elyra to help out with the food crisis anyway, and the kind of status we can give you here would help you a lot in gaining access to their systems. Like their dungeon, for instance."

"...We do need to access the dungeon there," Sev said, though he looked incredibly put out at the idea of being a political delegation. Misa didn't blame him — she didn't feel entirely comfortable with it, either. Vex mostly just looked a paler green than usual, and Derivan was about as stoic as ever.

"There you go," the Guildmaster said. "That's settled, then! You're going to be our new Elyran delegates, which means I can tell Jerome that he's not cleared to go to Elyra, no matter how much he says that he's much better now."

Sev blinked. "...Is he... doing okay?"

"He won't stop flirting with Max," the Guildmaster said. "The two women he has with him don't seem very happy about it, but he's sort of oblivious."

Misa groaned. "Dammit, Jerome."

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