Chapter 1: Chapter 1 – A New Party Member

 

You have defeated The Thousand Maws of the Void (Pylon Guardian, Third Floor, Temple of the Godsforsaken Wanderers).

About time. I keep my feet moving, one in front of the other. The notification gets in my field of view and I dismiss it with annoyance; I’m looking at the pylon in question, breathing hard despite how short the walk is from the … boss room, I guess.

Doesn’t take a whole lot of looking, at least. My next move is obvious, given the thing’s construction and assuming that it matches the pattern of rewards not being puzzles or traps in their own right. Even given that, it’s going to be brutal; but there's no direction left in the world for me other than forwards right now.

This is going to suck.

I lean against the pylon, trying to be careful. I jostle my right shoulder against the harsh angles of the crystal anyway, hissing in pain, and then hiss again as I twist to get my right hand into the appropriate socket. My left hand goes into the other socket without difficulty, but when I go to grip the handle there, the sound I make is more of a groan than a hiss. The icon at the bottom right corner of my vision dances, promising a really bad time if I follow through; last time I had an icon dance at me, well. Three, two, no time to think about what I'm doing, one, I’m gonna regret this but not as much as I’d regret not doing it; I grab both grips and fall backwards, using my body weight to do the pulling.

When I'm done screaming, there's a woman standing there with an expression of deep concern and yup, a whole row of icons, and notifications saying things like Condition (Partial Fracture) -> Condition (Complete Fracture). She says something calm and kind of cautious, but I don’t parse it in the slightest. Not because of the pain, mind you; I mean, the pain is substantial and all, and the notifications don’t want to be dismissed, but all of that pales before how stunning she is. Shining blond hair, tall, flawless skin other than the faintest of smile lines and some weathering around the corners of her eyes, each of her features gorgeous; mostly, though, she’s armored up in chainmail and boots with her helmet tucked under one arm and her gauntlets hanging on her belt, and even through the armor and under-layers her tits make me forget how to speak.

“Can you, uh.” I lick my lips. “Repeat that? I think I passed out a little, activating the pylon.” I probably had, too; one of the icons looks like a little discontinuity sign, a clock with a broken circle around it.

“Are you in need of healing, my lord?”

I’m pretty sure that isn’t what she’d said, but since the answer is yes, I just nod at her. A few moments later the pain is flooding out of me after one last spike as my HP goes up from 2 to my 11-point maximum and a few of the icons fade away. She frowns prettily at me, less concerned and more worrying. “Who are you,” I ask to preempt her, “and how did you get here?”

Status, I say to myself while I ask. It still doesn’t work; the damn dybbuk was still between me and either the invocation or the display.

“I am Reca Amber Ashborn,” she says with a smile and a voice so honeyed I could feast on it. “A woman of twenty seven years, trained in the arts of travel, war, and diplomacy by the Temple Lands in their Crusade. I am a Paladin of Kazir, God of harvests, festivals, and growth, who is First in this province.” She breathes out, sighing. “I have parents, and siblings, and a home to return to, if I wish to; I have been made with craft, with twenty seven years of having lived rooting itself into the world, and perhaps they will even know me. You called me, lord; not two minutes ago, from the realm of potential you brought me into this Temple to be your sword and your shield, your healer and your voice, and to be by your side in combat and out of it."

My eyes probably should have boggled, but honestly, they’re too busy watching the way her jaw and lips move as she speaks to boggle. The words still penetrate eventually, and I shake my head. “I what? That’s awful!”

“It’s not so bad existing, my lord.” She smiles at me, proud and fierce and joyous. I’m pretty bad at facial expressions, really bad at people in general for all that I can be good at people in the specific, so there has to be some kind of shenanigans going on that I can tell so clearly what her expression is. “From the dead dry dust they say a Reca is conjured, and the pylon’s magic, and a Magelord’s need and will; and how you have forgotten these things worries me greatly. Not two minutes ago, from those things you brought me into being, Class and God and Skills as much as my history and Self.”

“Yeah, uh. Wow, that’s kind of fucked up.” I’m leaning against a wall, using the cool stone to support me, feeling the flat texturelessness that still weirds me out. It’s like someone just added a stone wall, abstractly, and didn’t bother adding its attributes, I think to myself, not for the first time. Reca - no, the way she said that sounded like it was a title, so she’d be Amber - puts her hand on my chest when I make as if to get up, but I don’t even get to that point before the flare of pain has me settling back down, eyes tearing up. “Shit, shit shit.”

“Broken ribs,” she says with a grimace. “What did you do to yourself, lord?”

“This and that. Got in some fights.” I think about shrugging, and then think better of it. “Look, I haven’t been able to see my Status since pretty early this dungeon floor, so I’m not exactly sure. I know I’ve got some fractures, a concussion, a couple of sprains, and I passed out when I did the thing with the handles.”

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“Haven’t been able to—” She shakes her head. “Not the most important, not for this moment, we have more urgent things.” She grabs my left hand in her right, twining her fingers with mine, frowning as I hiss in pain. The pain dies down, like it’s scared of her angry face.

Boon: Pain Suppression (Lesser).

The notification pops into my face, starting to fade after the split second it takes me to read it. I can’t customize anything right now, but at least the fast-fade still works; at the beginning, the auto-fade was so long it barely counted as existing. Boon, that’s new. It’s formatted like a Condition, but I’d seen Pain Suppression before when I used a Potion of Berserking, only then it was a Buff.

She grabs my other arm, working her grip towards my hand from halfway towards the elbow, and I notice that a couple icons are less dance-y than they were a moment ago. Not for the first time, I wish that I had some sort of at-will magic perception; she’s obviously doing something. “A Magelord who can open a pylon with a broken hand, a broken arm, and three cracked ribs, and shape a woman who is more than a healer.” Her voice is husky. “And conditions upon conditions besides. It’s said that a Reca is only woven deep into the world when that in and of itself is a stricture of their creation, a constraint of their being; is that so?”

“Huh.” My voice comes out in half a huff, half a gasp as she lets go of my wrists to put a hand on my chest and the pain flares through my Skills and the Boon. I can feel the bones grind back into place, and it’s distinctly unpleasant. It takes me a bit to remember that she’d asked a question, and that it’s more than a non-sequitur. “Can’t tell ya. Wasn’t conscious at the time.”

“[Healing Touch].” The word ripples through the world, harmonizing with her voice as she invokes the skill out loud. I raise my eyebrow - there’s no way she needed to vocalize that - but she tilts her head to the side, brow furrowed in gorgeous concentration, and that distracts me pretty thoroughly. “Take three deep breaths,” she says, a long moment after the grinding stops. I raise an eyebrow at her again, and this time she notices and raises one back at me. “Is the notion of breathing deeply not within your cultural repertoire, my lord?”

I choke on a laugh, shaking my head. I breathe as deeply as I can, wincing at the steady, searing pain, but her hands are under my shirt, pressing and prodding and just generally feeling amazing as they run over me, so I take another breath, cringing less as the pain comes. The echoes of the skill are still either orbiting her hands or emanating out of them, I can’t tell which.

The third breath is pain-free, and I sigh in what I hope she interprets as relief as her hands settle my shirt back down. Not much chance that she misunderstood, though, given the glint I can see in her eye. I was never much for subtlety, and especially not when it came to women; like I have for the last couple decades, I’m mostly just trying not to be actively obnoxious. Then again she doesn’t seem bothered at all, and that’s its own sort of trouble.

“You don’t have to call me that, you know.”

“My lord?” Her raised eyebrow would make it clear the double meaning is intended if the open smirk left it in any doubt.

“My name’s Adam. Adam Levi James.” My voice drops a conspiratorial register in volume. “The Levi stands for Leviathan.”

“Does it really, my lord.”

Her voice, dry as dust, makes me snicker in laughter. “Okay, no, it doesn’t. Anyway, what now? I guess we move on. Half this level and the whole of the next still to go, no more status icons. And if there’s anything I’ve learned from this Temple, it’s to keep moving.”

“I should prefer letting you rest after that healing, and perhaps getting to know each other, and how we fight. And I should prefer to know who it is I fight and strive with. Where do you come from? I know you to be an Outsider; how did you come to arrive here?”

“That. Isn’t unreasonable.” I force the words out of a tight throat, jovial mood evaporated. “I’m from another world, and I…” I trail off. She’s looking at me with a heart-stopping intensity, and I can’t keep going, but I have to. “I’m deeply ... Amber. You’re the first person I’ve seen in two weeks. I’ve been trying to talk to monsters for lack of conversation partners, I’ve never killed before, I’d never gotten into a fight before! If I stop moving,” I say, with the tone of absolute confession it deserves, “if I stop putting one foot in front of the other, I’m going to fall apart completely, and we don’t have time. I’m past the grace period for the floor; every room, every encounter is accumulating mana with every second that passes.”

“Then if the way is forward, we shall walk it together, and find our rhythm in motion.” She reaches down, and we grasp wrists. It’s not so much that she helps me up as that she hauls me, effortlessly and smoothly, to my feet. “Onwards, then. Adam.”

There’s a note of something positive in her voice, joy or excitement or maybe even wonder, and I grin weakly at her. Onwards.

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