BleedingTears
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Arcanist - Chapter 34
🕑 Added 2025-03-09 15:19:40 +0000 UTC‘Ding’ You have managed to defeat [Necromancer - lvl 205]! For killing an enemy above your own level, you are granted bonus experience.
You have leveled up! 5 Stat Points granted!
You have leveled up! 5 Stat Points granted!
You have leveled up! 5 Stat Points granted!
…
You have leveled up! 5 Stat Points granted!
You have leveled up! 5 Stat Points granted!
You have leveled up! 5 Stat Points granted!
Sounds in his ears. Men coming up near and checking the aftermath. People whispering shakily about the terrible war that had unexpectedly ended by someone else. Undead squirming around their Lich. Valens watching them with blurry vision through all of it while managing his wounds with a number of Lifesurges.
It gave him something to focus on, to relieve his mind of the pressure of the sight before him. He stitched each hole with perfect precision, stretching the new skin tight over them. When he was done with the effort, only the stains remained, but still, the pain was there somewhere.
What’s a man to do when he wins a war? Celebrate? Cry? Now it made sense why the soldiers were intent on getting drunk after a night of brutal battle. Drink away the worries. Choke them down with cheap liquor and turn the mind to a pelt that wouldn’t ask questions. But there was nothing of such here in this cave. Nothing but faces with questions in them.
Valens waved them off and dragged himself, wincing, by the Necromancer’s corpse, dragged his legs there and buckled down in a heap of aching bones and scarred flesh, laid over the ground with his eyes facing the ceiling and reflecting the diminishing light of the Undead Lich’s fog.
All too quiet, now he felt about himself. Strange that just now people were dying with cries choked tight in their throats. Terrible killing and a waste of precious lives, for no purpose in light and done because of a difference in mind. The Necromancer’s thinking. His sense of purpose. Wicked, true, but perhaps there had been some truth to it.
It made scarcely a difference in the way Valens’s body screamed. Too spent in mind and body both, scenes flashing before his eyes, a deep feeling settling round his chest and telling him that nothing would make much sense anymore.
But then, Valens rather thought, sense had been short in supply lately. He’d broken too many bones to now think about the times before. Better to carry on, as Nomad put it. Better to reap the rewards and reckon about it later.
He glanced down as people started stirring. His hands trembled as he caught, out of the corner of his eye, a pair of men carrying a wounded woman, cleaved across the face with what looked like a sharp spear. Blood dripped down the tip of her nose, one eye looking up, the other painfully blank and rolling white. Fingers of her right hand twitched ever so slightly, as if something in her was still trying to cling to life.
Over there, deep within the Undead ranks, dead men were busy picking up the pieces of broken Heartstones. Even in their quiet subservience, they uttered a word or two to their fallen brothers and sisters, placing a ginger hand over their bodies before carrying them up.
It was with a heavy silence that people carried on with their duties. It was the same kind of silence that would hang thick whenever Valens would gaze across the bloodied lands after the skirmishes, hands stinging dully after a number of operations, the cries of the men still fresh in his mind.
Then Valens started coughing. A deep, bloody kind of cough that made the people turn their eyes toward him. He choked on his own spit, ribcage rattling, fingers scraping against the muddy ground, and he pulled himself up, bent over his legs and retched out there on his own blood until nothing remained in his guts.
Steps sounded close. Then came a wave of nauseating stench that felt oddly familiar. Valens cracked his eyes open and saw blood-smeared curls of blonde hair dance in his vision, framing a face that looked equally dangerous. She got herself a bloody hole round the side of her chest, but she was breathing. Still alive, the Berserker was.
“Told you to stay back,” Celme said, checking him with a rough hand, patting his body round, and making him wince, flinch, and smile. Right. He hadn’t been alone through it all. There were some people in his back.
“I’m a terrible healer,” Valens said, shaking his head. There wasn’t much from his robe left to cover his body, but the blood of his wounds had dried conveniently to patch his bare skin, and it also invited the wind to whisper some soothing cold across. He was grateful for it. Made the sting a whole lot more bearable.
“What did you do?” Celme asked when she finished checking him. She sat by his side and stared at the ceiling. Her face was sickly pale, lips cracked out and peeling off the edges, but the glint in her eyes seemed fresh. That was new.
“I—“ Valens paused. What had he done, exactly? He had fixed a mind broken beyond repair. That was what he did when he felt there were no more options left in his hands. He laid that wicked mind of the Necromancer’s to rest, and that was more justice than the man deserved, he was thinking. “I’ve done something dark, if that’s what you’re asking. I’ve broken all the oaths and gone around everything I should’ve held dear. Did what I’ve been told over and over again that I shouldn’t. Crossed the lines. Too many of them to count. And worse…”
“Worse?” Celme looked him in the eye.
“Worse, I don't know how I should feel about it,” Valens confessed, and felt his chest grow light as the words poured out of his lips.
“Been there,” Celme said, lowering her chin. “But I don’t think you should feel guilty because you’ve killed a Necromancer. You did it, right? I’m not sure how, but—“
“That was no man, child,” came a voice, thumping in Valens’s chest as light illuminated the stretch they had been sitting across. When he craned his neck, he saw the Lightmaster standing there with his light growing dimmer by the second. His face, disturbingly normal for a man of his weight, seemed to be conflicted. By reflex alone, Valens tried to feel him with the Resonance and saw in there a mix of emotions. Relief. Rage. Guilt. All of them.
That’s what I should’ve felt.
But Apathy held him close and refused to have him face the aftermath of his terrible doing, acting as though a shield against the pouring emotions. He should’ve been grateful for it, but he couldn’t put himself not to think about the oaths he'd broken and how false of a healer he’d become through all of it.
Such hypocrisy.
“Treading the path of the Damned is an alluring promise that desperate men often choose to pursue,” the Lightmaster said, stepping near them and nudging the Necromancer’s corpse with the tip of his right foot. “It brings power unearned, fills the mind with pleasure that no normal man can hope to ever feel. It seeks the unfortunate, mostly, but often the case is that it finds a true host that will serve it well. Thus the men start seeking the power, knowing not at each step it will seep deep into their cores and turn them slowly into a creature that is no longer a man, nor a beast—something stuck between the two, something that shouldn’t have ever existed, but forged nonetheless by the promises of the Shadow.”
Valens frowned at him as Apathy let a trail of frustration pass through its steely net. “Then someone has better do something about this Shadow.”
The Lightmaster raised a hand, palm glowing with golden light, then pointed a finger down at the ground where the shadows of his fingers were cast on the muddy patch. “We all have one such Shadow resting in our hearts, child. The notion that Shadow is inherently bad and wicked is false, for it is simply a reflection of the stretches of our inner being. It is the part that you blame for every wrong, for every missed step, and choices that have brought pain. It is the unloved and detested part of our beings, cast down in the depths of our souls to be forgotten. But you can’t escape the past, nor can you ignore your mistakes. You must face them, however painful it would be.”
“So that’s what you do, Lightmaster?” Valens said, voice cold as Celme shifted uncomfortably by his side. “You help the men fallen deep beyond saving? And that’s what I’ve done, as well? Brought relief to a man who has drowned in his own Shadow?”
“He was indeed beyond—“
“Utter nonsense and a whole lot of crap as usual, Lightmaster,” came another voice that had a raspy quality about it. Lord Zahul’s fog washed down near them and sizzled when the Lightmaster waved his golden hand to fend it off.
They clashed in silence for a moment before settling on a truce that seemed to be hanging on a thin thread. The Undead Lich scoffed and nodded at Valens.
“Kid, listen to me. It is not that deep. I have one thing I’d like my chiefs to tell their men, and one thing only — If there’s anyone out for your life, then you ought to respect that and give equal measure to that intent. Kill or get killed. What do you reckon about that, Hook?”
Hook dragged his armored feet beside the Undead Lich, stood there like a towering beast clad in bloody plates, and gave a strong nod. “Simple is the code we teach down in the Depths, Lord. It has never left us disappointed.”
“Hear! Hear!” Lord Zahul patted him on the chest piece with his cane, then turned slowly to face the Lightmaster. “You can speak the tales somewhere else. Tell them with a twist or two, if you want. But don’t you ever try to sneak your way into a young Healer’s head by spitting a story about you being this magnanimous, understanding man that has no agenda in this cave other than that you’re simply here to help a broken soul find some solace in the otherworld.”
“Your words reflect your crooked way of thinking, Lich,” Lightmaster said, with a hint of fury in his face. “I was just answering a question. This young man has done something beyond understanding, don’t you think? A Level 88 Healer besting a Necromancer by some trick that my eyes fail to see. It’d be a terrible waste if this mind goes astray someday.”
“That was indeed a good trick,” Lord Zahul said, eyes turning toward Valens. He paused as he weighed him up and down. “This sort of feat never goes unnoticed, kid, which is why you must be prepared.”
“For what?” Valens asked.
Lord Zahul jerked a finger to the Lightmaster. “For men like him! Look at him, acting as if he’s not here hunting for the Queststone, as if he’s not out here for a scheme he’s been concocting with that older brother of his. Some King, eh, Lightmaster? Crows have more influence over the people than he in your pitiful kingdom. But that’s a big bad shadow you’ve got there, eh? Pray tell, how do you plan on keeping this away from the Divine Orders’ eyes?”
“You mind your words, or I won’t hear your—”
“The Legion never sleeps.” Hook thumped his spiked mace on the ground when the Lightmaster took a step toward the Undead Lich, and the whole Undead horde stirred with him as green fog rolled forth. “The Legion never tires. The Legion never demands anything other than respect. You will respect the Lord, Lightmaster.”
“I—”
“Master, forget it,” Celme said, rising to her feet and placing a hand over Lightmaster’s trembling arm. “We are all tired and spent. If not for Valens, things could have been way worse. Let us all appreciate the help and focus on patching the wounds. You have your own men need tending, no, Undead?”
Hook gave her a hard look, then nodded slightly as he stepped back. Valens then caught Nomad’s sight around the din, looking at his sword with green light falling off his shoulders. His brothers were picking the dead beside him, but he seemed lost, as if unaware of what was happening around him.
Is something wrong with the gemstone? I thought it would last at least for a week or two.
Valens shook his head. He couldn’t go there and check on him when he had Lightmaster and the Undead Lich breathing this close to his neck. He first had to deal with… whatever this was.
“Young man, you have proved yourself a valuable ally in this battle,” the Lightmaster said all of a sudden, looking gravely at him even though his words suggested otherwise. “Yet I’m not sure what an Arcane Healer is, or how you managed to slip inside this Rift. I can’t let a stranger live—”
“A stranger? Surely not!” Lord Zahul rasped with a chuckle. “Your kingdom may have a crooked way of dealing with Healers, but I can’t have you kill him now and here.” He tapped his cane on the ground and a bony mark grew out of the mud. He picked it slowly, with gentle care, before presenting it to Valens with one hand stretched out. “Still, take this, kid. This here is the Ninth Legion’s mark. Keep this on you, so when you die, I can take you in as an apprentice. That Inferno would be useful against the Lost.”
“When I die?” Valens muttered, then remembered how things worked with the Undead. “Thanks… Lord Zahul.”
“Modest and kind,” Lord Zahul said, and suddenly, he was standing by him, with his rotten breath hissing against the side of Valens’s face. “But that’s not you entirely, isn’t it, young man? I’ve seen you during the chaos, the look on your face, how your lips curled whenever you lashed at the Necromancer’s horde with your flames. You hold onto that desire. Hold onto that tight, if you will. What you did there was no simple trick. I see in your fate the unmistakable rise to power, an ambition so fierce that it might burn everything around you. Hold onto that power tight, young Surgemaster. I will be waiting.”
Then he was back, a ghost slipping through solid ground, settling on his normal, wizened form with Hook standing round his back, the other people looking as if nothing strange had happened.
But Valens could still feel that breath on his neck. His skin crawled as the Lich looked amicably at him.
“So?” Lord Zahul muttered a moment after, tapping his cane on the ground as he gave the Lightmaster a side-eyed glance. “When will you take the Queststone out? I’m dying to see how many levels your flock will get after a quest of this magnitude.”
Hook chuckled at the words. Valens, on the other hand, couldn’t help but give a sigh. He couldn’t wrap his head around what was really happening here. The strange relationship between the two sides left him baffled, to say the least.
“Your jealousy is refreshing,” Lightmaster said, and waved a hand over his robe. Golden light sparkled as a perfectly round object materialized out of thin air, sending a wave of different frequencies that dinned in the Resonance. Valens caught the Void’s now-familiar tunes there. That thing was more than a simple stone.
“This quest will mark the beginning of our mission,” he continued, holding the stone high as the men of the Duality Guild began gathering around him. Faces looked up in giddy expectation, men and women brightening at the sight of the Queststone. Valens himself was curious as to what this stone would really accomplish.
What is it for? The quest has been completed from what I can tell, but I don’t exactly know why they are so excited to see it?
“People will witness the true deity of Lord Zodros with the rise of our Temple. People will slowly see the truth and start believing the cause. The End might be near, but so long as the masses are united under a single belief, so long as the Will of Zodros blooms in the hearts of men, we can resist the currents of fate.”
Undead worked around the back in muted silence while the men and women held their breaths. It was silent all at once, with Lord Zahul and Hook watching it happen with almost bored faces. Valens didn’t give them much thought, but was still curious as he stared at the occasion.
Lightmaster tapped a finger over the Queststone as its light reached a blinding golden before disintegrating into thousands of specks that fluttered about the men waiting around him. Hundreds of them found their way close to Valens’s chest, peculiar things resonating like little bells in the Resonance.
Then they wormed inside his flesh.
‘Ding!’
[Gate of the Necromancer - Queststone
Difficulty: C
Description: Melton’s King has given the claim of the Queststone to the Duality Guild. Cleanse the Necromancer’s rot. Bring back the Traitor’s Corpse.]
[Quest has been completed!]
[You have slain the Necromancer and cleansed the Rift. You will be rewarded according to your contribution.]
Valens felt something shift around his chest cavity. A look around him showed him that everybody, even the Undead, was in a state of silence as if waiting for something to happen.
Then it started.
A flood of notifications covered his vision.
