Chapter 8
The goblins left an obvious trail of trampled grass and broken branches leading deeper into the forest. Luna tracked it with casual ease while Alsen wished he had bought a fur coat to keep himself warm. Yes, it was early summer, but the magical exhaustion made him feel as if he were freezing.
“You look great,” Luna remarked cheerfully. “Like you haven’t, at all, overdone it with the spells.”
He rolled his eyes. “I feel like shit. I can’t tell how much power I can use in this body.”
“Aren’t all the breathing exercises and meditations you do supposed to help with that?”
So, she did know what they were. He did them for hours a day, but he never told her what for. “They increase how much I can use. They function well in that regard, but because the limit keeps increasing, I have no sense of where I actually am. And the backlash hits with a delay, apparently.”
“Yeah, like when you walk too much in a day, you get really sore only the next day.”
The vault sat in a small clearing, built into the forest floor. Someone had constructed a proper stone frame, filled with a steel door covered in runic inscriptions. Moss crawled over most of it, but the craftsmanship remained evident. This wasn’t goblin work.
Alsen tried to push out a scanning spell. His power flickered, but the spell succeeded, detecting magic in the door. “I can confirm it’s magically protected.”
Luna walked up to the door, examining the runes. She ran her finger over one of them. “These look weird. I can’t really read runes, but these are weird. No idea why, but they are.”
He tried to make sense of the runes. Since he never learned any runic language to begin with, he couldn’t tell anything about these either. “I’ve never been much of a rune scholar.”
“Nobody is. Some people just pretend to be. Anyway, this doesn’t have a keyhole, and I don’t have lockpicks anyway, so we can either try to dig around or you blast it open.”
Alsen sat down against a tree, letting his body rest. “I vote for waiting for me to recover. I need a few hours.”
“I saw a pond back that way.” Luna pointed. “I’m going to wash off the goblin blood. It’s starting to itch.”
“Don’t wander too far.”
She snorted. “Don’t worry. I won’t leave you to starve.”
Luna disappeared into the forest. Alsen closed his eyes, focusing on his recovery breathing exercises.
In this mana-rich environment, recovery went faster than it would have been back home.
Not that he had any frame of reference for magical exhaustion back home.
He’d never had enough mana to exhaust himself with, theoretically speaking.
The forest sounds filled the silence she left behind. Birds, insects, the rustle of leaves in a faint breeze. So different from the constant noise from cars and people he’d grown up with. He could get used to this.
His mind wandered to the goblin massacre.
Corwin’s reaction bothered him, though not enough to regret the decision.
The old man acted as if Alsen were somehow wrong.
But goblins were monsters. They kidnapped people, stole from travelers, and bred endlessly.
Leaving them alive meant more victims down the road.
The void marks on them only reinforced his conviction. Whatever connection existed between the void and these creatures, it couldn’t be good.
Still, the look on Corwin’s face lingered in his memory.
Luna returned about an hour later, hair wet, clothes damp but cleaner. She’d found a way to wash them, apparently. “The pond was nice. Cold, but nice. You could make yourself even colder by dipping in to really enjoy the experience.”
He snorted. That was exactly what he planned to do.
She sat down across from him, humming a new, light tune. “So, how do we blast the door open? The treasure is probably straight below the door, so completely annihilating it with your supremely divine lance from above would destroy the treasure too.”
He rubbed his face with his palm. He had hoped she was done with that. Apparently not.
Still, she had a valid point. And since the door was built into the ground, he couldn’t get it from the side. “I’ll need to find a good angle.”
“Oh, yeah, angles are crucial. It’s a lot better when you hit the correct spot.” She chuckled. “You could climb up a tree.”
And get a good diagonal angle. “Yeah, that’ll work.”
They waited. Luna hummed various tunes, some melancholic, some oddly cheerful.
Alsen continued his breathing exercises, feeling his magical reserves slowly refill.
He also stopped feeling so cold. The mana in this world really was extraordinary.
What would have most likely taken days back home happened in hours here.
By late afternoon, he felt ready enough. “All right. We need a good tree.”
“That one.” Luna pointed. She jumped to her feet.
They walked to it, and she helped him climb up on a thick branch. Not high enough, so he pulled himself on the branch above him. He sat on it, lacking the space to stand.
Alsen focused, pulled on his power, and aimed at the vault door.
Lance of Annihilation.
Pure destructive force beamed from him. It disintegrated the branches before him, the vault door, and the ground beyond, digging dozens of feet into the ground.
“Nice!” Luna shouted, rushing to the door.
Alsen carefully dropped down to the branch under him, and then again from that one to reach the ground.
Luna already held her nose when he got closer. “It doesn’t smell like treasure.”
The smell hit Alsen. Rancid, foul stench of rot hit his nose. He covered his nose, and with the other hand, conjured a tiny floating orb of light. He sent it into the darkness below.
The vault turned out to be more of a formerly well-sealed hole. Shelves lined the walls, accompanied by barrels in the center.
Rotten meat, shelved and piled, filled everything.
Alsen stared at it. “That’s... unexpected.”
“Is that like three cows and a horse worth of meat?” Luna glared down. “See that?” She pointed with the free hand. “Looks like a book.”
The meat had mostly decomposed into an unidentifiable mass of putrefaction. Bones stuck out at odd angles, and the stone floor underneath had been permanently stained. The nearly perfectly sealed entrance preserved it all just enough to rot slowly.
Someone really wanted to save their meat.
He did see what Luna pointed at. A thin, leather-bound book. Who stored a book with half a ton of meat?
“Do you have a spell to get the book out?”
Hmmm… he couldn’t yet levitate even himself, much less something he couldn’t touch. “I could blast the meat under it, send it flying towards us…. Never mind.”
Luna chuckled and withdrew. She rummaged a bit in her backpack. She pulled out a rope and went on to tie it around a nearby oak.
Alsen stepped aside. He didn’t need to catch all this smell.
Luna measured the rope’s length three times before she tied it around her waist. Finally, she ran to the vault and jumped into the hole. She flung herself down, turning midair to catch the rope with her legs.
The rope’s pull stopped her, midair, just within reach of the book. She did, and instantly started pulling herself back up, using mostly her legs. She got out.
Alsen resisted the urge to clap. To pull off this move on the first try required insane distance evaluation. Actually… Luna had already done quite a few subtle, but at the same time insane feats.
They were level five, so the System barely granted her any bonuses. The body wasn’t her own, and she didn’t use any magic.
So, everything Luna did was raw skill, all gained in her previous life.
How old was she?
He realized he didn’t know. But did it matter?
Alsen’s age made no difference as he got a new body that roughly matched a body in its early twenties. Luna’s body also seemed to be as young. He automatically assumed it would be of a similar age to the original Luna.
But that was an assumption he made without thinking about it, as it didn’t even hold for himself. This wasn’t the time to delve into the topic, though.
Luna waved the book, untying the rope from herself. “I didn’t touch anything, but I think I’ll stink of rotten meat for a week, anyway.”
Alsen smiled. “That was impressive.” He walked to her and took the book. “Let’s read it as we walk.”
They picked up their backpacks and headed back towards the road. They left the vault behind, following the trail back through the goblin village, and eventually found their way back to the road.
The Lass was waiting for them.
According to the map, it was about half a day’s walk north of where the goblins had ambushed Corwin’s cart. They found the cart still overturned, though someone, most likely Corwin, had gathered the scattered books and scrolls into a pile.
Alsen considered taking some of them. He decided against it. They weren’t his, and Corwin would probably return for them eventually.
Luna found his tracks on the road, so Corwin was on his way home.
Well, they didn’t deliver him all that safely, but he was going to live.
He might be angry about how it happened, but at the end of the day, he was going to be happier eating a warm dinner with his wife, rather than struggling to sleep in a goblin cage.
They headed in their own direction, onward to the Oak Library. As they walked, Alsen read from the diary. Luna listened, humming one of her usual tunes.
“‘Day 15,’” he read aloud. “‘The dragonkin came again today. Third time this month. They took everything from the Hendersons. Every last scrap of grain, every chicken, even the seed stock for next season. The Hendersons have nothing left.’”
“Dragonkin?” Luna asked. “What are those?”
He shrugged. “I’ve never heard that name.
” Outside video games, but those weren’t necessarily applicable to their current world.
He continued reading. “‘Day 23. The patrols are getting worse. They say it’s for the campaign, that the Dragon Emperor needs provisions for his armies. But they take more than provisions. They take everything. Marcus tried to hide his cattle in the forest. They found them anyway. They always find everything.’”
Luna’s humming had stopped. “That sounds bad.”
“It gets worse.” He flipped ahead a few pages.
“‘Day 47. I’ve found it. An old vault in the forests, sealed with magic from before the Dragon Lord’s time.
The dragonkin don’t know about it. They can’t.
I’m going to hide what I can there. At least when this is over, when the campaign ends, I’ll have something left. ’”
“That doesn’t seem to have worked out.”
“The last entry is interesting.” Alsen found the page.
“‘Day 52. The campaign is taking longer than anyone expected. Rumors say the Dragon Emperor himself has come. I’ve moved everything I can to the vault, even what remains of my beloved horse. I’ve salted what I could, but it won’t last forever.
I’ll return when things calm down. I have to believe things will calm down. ”
“How old is this diary?”
Alsen examined the leather, the paper quality, the ink. “Can’t tell.”
“Well, if dragons were on a campaign around here, we would have probably been able to tell.” Luna kicked a stone down the path. “But if the dragon emperor died, there would be a monument to celebrate it somewhere around.”
“Vellhorn is supposedly the major city in this region. They should have a library there.”
They continued walking. The forest gave way to more open terrain, rolling hills dotted with occasional farmsteads. They all looked like they were abandoned ages ago.
About twelve hours later, they approached a T-shaped crossing in a forest.
“There!” Luna pointed ahead. “I’m pretty sure that’s the Lass.”