Chapter 1 #2
"This is a good time to do that thing we were talking about," Olrik said, pursing his lips as he stared at me, his pointed ears marking him as an Aos sí, a high fae.
He looked just like an elf to me, but I hadn't survived this long at this school by saying a slur like that to someone who could end my life because he was in a bad mood.
The Aos sí, at least the ones with black hair and pale skin, were insufferable and just as dangerous as the lycans high on a Blood Moon.
They were the fascists of the magic realm, all focused on their race being superior to all others.
That didn't stop them from working with shifters or other Aos sí who had the taint of Chaos on them, but their belief system that their physical appearance and magical gifts made everyone else default servants to them was straight up nazi talk.
The one thing that every mundane could agree on was that fascism was evil, even if the Nazis were beautiful elves, and being anti-fascist meant you believed in basic human rights for everyone, not just the wealthy.
But there wasn't anything I could do about that, just like there was nothing I could do about what I saw in the fish hatchery.
All I could do was survive.
Survive and hope that the prophecy that the Chaos God would return and fuck everything up would happen within my lifetime.
"Good call," Vut said, striding towards me.
I stepped back. Not far enough, not fast enough.
His hand shot out, and I flinched. He caught the back of the carry pack and lifted, easing some of the weight off my spine. I didn’t feel any form of relief.
"Here, let me take that for you," he said, his kindness a red flag streaming across a field.
I clung to the straps.
"No, I'm good, I got this," I said, panic thudding in my chest.
There was no version of this school where Vut took the pack to be kind. If I were hanging over an acid trap, fingers slipping on the stone lip, they would grab the pack before they grabbed me. As long as it was strapped to my back, I was inventory. Inventory had value.
I was not a fighter; I was a run and hider.
If I had been, I would not have lasted this long…
though that was not entirely accurate. A few talented mundane fighters ended up slotted into groups.
Talented was the keyword. There were no mediocre survivors that would put up a fight.
If you fought back, you had to be exceptional.
Exceptional enough that a ranked group decided you were worth the slot.
Working-class male mundanes who pushed back without that level of skill died early.
Even so, it was still better to be a man here than a woman.
Vut tore the pack from my hands.
The straps burned across my palms as they slipped free. I staggered forward, boots skidding on damp stone.
Jonas caught me, steadying me, and I knew that I was about to die.
None of these guys cared about me. Jonas would rather trip me and laugh as I fell than steady me.
I felt a sharp tug on the back of my neck, and then Jonas let me go, stepping back, a cut leather cord draping down either side of his closed fist. I reached up to touch the bare space where my most important possession used to be.
He'd taken the one thing I absolutely needed to survive the Dungeon.
"Please," I begged, reaching out to him. "Don't do this."
Should I drop to my knees? No, that wouldn't do anything.
They would just enjoy the sight of me begging.
Should I try to snatch it from him? If they left without me, I would die here.
But if I attacked them and somehow managed to get it back, they would kill me anyway.
My recall stone was set to the same location as theirs.
"We can't win games with a squire that can't kill a goblin," Heacur said. "It's not personal."
"Just fire me!" I said, trying to use words to talk some sense into them, as if words had the power to break through into the minds of people who didn’t see me as a person. "I can work in the kitchen or on the farms. You don't have to leave me down here to die! Haven't I been a good squire?"
"Firing you is too much paperwork," Olrik said.
"Consider the next few hours of life a reward for good service," Vut said.
"Come on, let's go," Jonas said.
"Wait!" I shouted, lunging for him, but my desperate moment of aggression was too late.
They all used their recall stones, small objects spelled to allow them instant transport out of the Dungeon and back to their home.
I had worn my own recall stone around my neck, tied tightly to ensure that I would not lose it no matter what happened.
It never occurred to me that they would take it.
I always thought if I went, it would be because Vut ripped my head off in a fit of rage because I put the wrong amount of sugar in his coffee.
Panic flooded through me, but at the same time…this wasn’t what I expected.
I never thought they would just leave me alive.
I was alive, alone, and out of their control.
I was free.
Joy flooded through me, mixed in equal parts with terror.
I'd been Dungeon Diving with the Barons for all this time now.
I knew exactly how dangerous the Dungeon was.
I had no weapons and no one to prod me with a sword to force me to walk into a room first to see if the doors would lock behind me and trap me in there with one of the more dangerous monsters.
I had no supplies, but also no one who would start shouting in a quiet area, demanding that more monsters appear.
I was free, but I was in a Dungeon that could easily kill me and absorb the magic held in my body like I was a midday snack.
If it noticed me.
I was good at not being noticed.
I took a slow, deep breath, keeping myself calm.
I rolled up the sleeve on my jacket, double-checking that the tattoo was still there.
I traced the familiar lines of the ink I'd gotten before I ever came to this place.
It wasn't the perfect clean lines of the simple spells I'd learned in my first year.
It was a complex thing, with intersecting lines and runes, most of which I didn't know how to read.
My basics of spellcrafting class barely covered anything, and none of the runes had anything to do with healing or detection.
I didn't even know it was a spell at the time I got it.
I'd been drunk, and my new familiar had drawn out the design, insisting I go and get it marked somewhere out of sight on my body as a celebration of our bond.
He explained what it was for before the interview, powering it for the first time.
The old grief came and went, like a wave, as I thought of the little squirrel-like creature that had bonded itself to me.
I was his ticket to the magic realm. All he had to do was serve as my familiar until I eventually died, then he would be free to exist in a realm saturated with magic, no longer trapped in the magic desert that was the mundane.
He never thought that I would outlive him.
This school was just as much a trap for familiars as it was for their mundanes.
I had another three weeks before I had to power the spell again, like I did every month, meditating and using the power I gathered within me to pour it into the shape, like liquid metal being poured into a mold.
That was how spells were cast. Order magic was a written language, drawn in geometric forms with runes that spelled out the instructions.
Spell shapes could be cast from memory, drawn in the air with the focused intent of the caster, and then infused with power, or they could be permanent, put down into material, and cast that way.
The state of mind that one had to be in to cast spells was similar to meditation, an empty-minded, flow-like state.
Those who could cast spells during combat were both impressive and deadly.
I wasn't deadly.
I was a pack mule.
I pulled my sleeve back down.
I took another round of slow breaths. Pack mules were tough. Pack mules could hike for days and forage for food.
I was in a situation, but it wasn't one that I couldn't handle.
All I had to do was stay calm and find ways to survive this, just like I had survived everything else at this school.
First goal was that I needed to get out of this labyrinth and find a safe room, one of the places that the Dungeon provided to encourage groups to stay inside of it longer and give it more opportunities to kill them.
There might be food and water there. Second goal was to find weapons and armor, so that if I had to fight, I would be in a better state for it.
My current main obstacle was that I had no map and was stuck in a maze.
My current blessings were that I didn't have a group of murderous magical jackasses telling me what to do.
I was in an area that was relatively calm.
I didn't have to carry a heavy load. There was a very good chance that I could sneak my way to safety if I was quiet enough and saw the monsters before they saw me.
I picked up a loose rock from the ground and scratched an X on the wall, right around shoulder height.
Then I put my hand on the wall. A breeze blew in from behind me, rippling the fabric of my jacket, cooling the sweat that had formed on my back from carrying the pack, and urging me forward into the unknown.
Something bellowed, deep and low, the tone vibrating through the stones of the maze with subsonic force, a warning that something else resided here.
Shit.