Machine Mage: An Isekai LitRPG, page 52
“Ugh. Doing what?” I croaked.
The relief at hearing me speak was palpable. “The noble-sacrifice thing. It’s endearing up to a point, but, eventually, you’ll have to learn a new trick to impress the girls.”
“It’s working, though. Right? I can tell you’re impressed.”
“Yeah.” She sniffed, nodding, again having to wipe her tears away so they didn’t fall on me. “Yeah, it’s working.”
“Oh good.” I sighed. “Long as you’re impressed.”
“I’ve gotten him out of the worst of it, stopped the bleeds, repaired some of the bones, but his human anatomy should take it from here,” Kolash said. “I am afraid I might put something where it isn’t supposed to go.”
To see what he meant, I checked my Status Screen.
HP [150/309]
Status lost: Burning
Status lost: Exposure [Radiant]
Status lost: Severed Spine
Status lost: Broken Bone [Arm]
Status lost: Broken Bone [Arm]
Status lost: Broken Bone [Arm]
Status lost: Broken Bone [Hand]
Status lost: Broken Bone [Jaw]
Status lost: Dislocated Bone [Shoulder]
Status lost: Internal Bleeding
Status lost: Punctured Lung
Status lost: Broken Bone [Rib]
Status lost: Ruptured Spleen
It went on like that for a while.
“See? That is what a real healer can do,” Trix squeaked from down by my feet. “Now we don’t have to force-feed him for a whole day to get him back on his feet.”
“Thank Constance for that,” I said. “Bole told me what was in the Undercity meal.”
“Hehe, yeah. You should have seen his face,” Bole sniggered. He was behind Samila along with Sissa and Geddon.
“Glad to have you back, young man,” Jassin said from the foot of my personal patch of land. “Are you quite done with your suicide attempt?” He wore his displeasure at my little stunt openly, with crossed arms and a dour frown.
I shrugged weakly. It hurt but not as badly as before.
Experimentally, I put out a hand to push myself up into a sitting position.
THUNK!
The sound surprised me—not because of the ring of metal. I was used to that. It was because it was coming from the wrong side of my body. I looked down to find my entire forearm still encased in my heavy steel gauntlet. Except parts of it looked absolutely slagged. The fingers and knuckles were messes of once-molten metal, and the forearm blackened and deformed, more concave now than when I’d last seen it. The blade I’d used to cut into the dragon looked like it had been made of wax and been rendered down until it had molded and fused with the wrist part of the gauntlet. The joint was entirely frozen.
And in the palm of my hand was the brightsteel blade.
“Ah, yes. We should talk about that,” Kolash said. “I did what I could with the bone and tissue damage, but that armor will have to be removed if you wish to make a full recovery. I assume you can handle that. There is also the issue of the priceless, holy relic you have clutched in your fingers.”
“That can wait, Bishop,” Jassin said. “Ryan is needed right now. Can you stand?”
I waved them off when they tried to put their hands under my shoulders, feeling the need to do this on my own. With some effort, I gingerly got to my feet, careful not to jostle my sore bits more than I needed to. What shirt I still had was stuck to me, glued there with dried blood, but the pain of most of the surface-level stuff was gone. A small mercy.
Once I was upright, I spared a moment to take everything in. The battlefield was a blackened wasteland. Every bit of the underbrush for at least a quarter-mile out was gone, replaced by soot and ash. The army was in the process of after-battle cleanup. Bonfires burned in the spaces between tree trunks, and hundreds of soldiers carried out the grim task of dragging bodies over to the pyres and heaving them on top. Meanwhile, patrols of spearmen walked in loose formations systematically stabbing the more-intact bodies, making sure they were truly dead.
Strangely, Kuul was amongst them. He sat with his back against a Mendau trunk, resting, his eyes closed, his one good arm laid against his chest. The fire inside of him seemed dimmer now but not entirely out. The soldiers gave the giant a wide berth, not bothering to collect the bodies that were closest to him. If those things started to move, the goeshi would probably want to handle it, anyway.
“He rests now,” Tiba said as she walked up to the rest of us, Kelub and Grorg in tow. The three of them looked in high spirits, all of them walking with springs in their steps, now that they were reunited and safe. “If the tall folk keep their distance, he doesn’t bother them. I am watching, though.”
A big knot of tension I hadn’t realized I’d been carrying loosened in my gut. “Tiba, you made it!”
“I make it,” Tiba replied brightly. “Sorry I am not here for the dragon fight, but Kuul gets carried away with the Baned. You handle it well, though.”
“He always die muchly,” Trix said in a slow series of grunts, his face contorted like he was maybe having stomach pain or about to vomit.
“Wait. Did you just speak Goblin?” I asked.
Trix’s ears flattened in embarrassment. “Oh, did I not use the proper—”
Tiba’s eyes lit up like someone had just handed her a whole birthday cake, candles and all.
“Trix, you speak! Do it again! Do it again!” She clapped her hands and bounced up and down excitedly. She looked so young when she did that, not like the first goblin queen in a millennium.
Trix cleared his throat and rolled his shoulders. “Uh—Ryan dies … uh … much. All time.”
Yeah, that sounded painful. I didn’t think the little guy’s throat was made for the sounds he was trying to imitate.
The goblin queen loved it, though. She lunged forward, squealing in delight, and took his hand, jabbering at him in Goblin, begging him to say something else, talking a mile a minute while Trix tried to follow. There was talk about making him a goblin, too, and since she was a queen now, she could knight him, and he could be in her royal retinue.
Did I just hear the word “concubine?” How would—What?
Meanwhile, Trix just stood there, blinking and obviously increasingly lost as the seconds ticked by. He looked back at me, pleadingly, but I wasn’t about to step into the middle of this.
I left them to it.
Jassin was there waiting impatiently, frowning still.
“If you are quite done, you and I have something to attend to,” he said. He grabbed my shoulder and pointed me toward the tutorial facility and the still-smoking corpse of a big Undead dragon. Her chest had burst open and taken a significant portion of her back with it, and her neck looked like it was barely attached anymore, lying there curled inward like a snake.
There, in the middle of the giant cavity the explosion had left, stood Nali. Her ghostly light cast the insides of Myss in a strange, dreamlike haze. For her part, Nali looked unfazed, expressionless but always seeming to be looking directly at me.
“She won’t speak with me or anyone I send,” Jassin said. “She appears to be a projection of some kind. A very advanced, very detailed messenger spell, and she has been waiting, I think, for you.”
I nodded. ‘It’s called a hologram. It’s made of light. Not sure how the System made her consciousness, though.”
“It’s conscious? Now that is interesting,” Jassin cooed hungrily. I could see him reassessing his previous observations, probably in hopes of recreating the process someday.
“Well, she’s an artificial intelligence, but she’s probably in a bad way,” I told him. “She’s not supposed to be like this. The Scourge has done a number on her, too.”
“I detect a troublesome tone in your voice, Ryan. This isn’t another problem that requires you to run off and die without consulting me, is it?” Jassin asked.
“Still sore about that?”
“It was literally half an hour ago, young man,” Jassin fumed. “Just because I put a complex explosive enchantment on you doesn’t mean I wish to see you die. The dragon was a daunting foe, yes, but—”
“You would have lost people bringing her down,” I interrupted. “I’m not apologizing for what I did, Jassin.”
That vein on his forehead did its pulsating thing again, and he looked like he wanted to lay into me in earnest. The moment didn’t last, however. His anger reached some kind of breaking point, and he ended up sighing and massaging his temple instead.
“Very well. I acknowledge that you did what you thought was right for our situation, but don’t do it again without—”
I put my hands up in surrender.
“I get it. I really do. I won’t do it again,” I assured him. He almost had to watch me die, and it had shaken him. Of all the things I understood in this multiverse, that feeling was first and foremost. “Now let’s go make sure Ralqir stays saved.”
Leaving the others behind, the two of us approached Nali carefully. We had to practically step into the dragon’s chest cavity to get within speaking range. This close, I could see Myss’s body was in an advanced state of decay, its flesh sagging down and in the process of liquifying and seeping into the soil. Thick, black sludge laid in a pool all around her, and it sprouted tiny hairs that waved eerily in my general direction.
On a hunch, I waved my gauntlet/brightsteel shiv over the stuff, and it literally shied away from the gesture. I used the technique to create some space for us.
Nali spoke first. Her tone was robotic, which paired badly with her weeping black eyes and disjointed body.
“Defiler, you may have been spared today, but nothing you do can stop this place from being cleansed. You have only prolonged its suffering.”
Jassin looked to me for translation.
“She seems pissed at me and, by extension, you,” I said. “It’s not her talking, I think. She’s speaking for the Scourge.”
Someone shouted an order overhead, and I saw a rank of soldiers with spears and torches engaging a trio of Scourge-Touched on the lip of the concrete ring. The monsters had emerged from the black pool, still dripping with ichor, only to be cut down.
“We have been destroying them since the end of the battle. They emerge from the slime immediately ready to kill,” Jassin said. “They are quite a bit weaker than the ones we fought in Eclipse, however. Perhaps because it is down to the dregs of the organic matter it likes to animate.”
“Nali, why do they keep coming out of the goo like that? Wouldn’t it make more sense to wait until we were gone to start replenishing their numbers?”
Nali twitched. “The Scourge does not have a good grasp of linear time. If it forms new agents now, it means that sometime in the future, it believes it will be successful.”
I translated.
“Immortals see the universe differently, I suppose. Of that I am constantly reminded,” Jassin said. “As far as I can tell, we have destroyed the majority that have troubled us thus far, but she may well be correct that in ten, maybe a hundred years, our ability to keep them back will be severely diminished by entropy. Perhaps the Empire will have internal turmoil. War. Perhaps just a lack of will to perform a task whose purpose was long forgotten. “
“It’s an enemy that never sleeps,” I said.
“Precisely. Ask her what it wants,” Jassin told me.
“Nali, what does the Scourge want from us?”
“For you to die, Defiler. For your kind to pay for their sin with erasure from the multiverse. For your memory to be forgotten for eternity. For all that you have touched to crumble to dust and be cast into the void.”
“Oh, is that all?” Jassin asked sarcastically after listening to my interpretation. “Please, forgive us if we do not go quietly into oblivion, miss.”
Nali didn’t answer Jassin, though. She just stared at me and waited for my answer.
“Why doesn’t she speak with me?” Jassin asked, annoyed.
I thought for a moment. “She’s corrupted, but I think she’s built on a base code that’s meant to be helpful for Animators like me. Maybe even after all the Scourge has done to her, she’s still obligated to answer my questions.”
“This will make things hard,” Jassin said, rubbing his forehead. “Ask her—”
“Hang on,” I interrupted him. “Nali, what really is the Scourge?”
Nali’s head glitched, giving me a glimpse of her real face—the fear, the pain—but then she was back to neutral. “As the name implies, the Scourge is a punishment inflicted upon humanity for its hubris in breaching the boundaries of its universe. It is a presence from beyond existence, formless, without purpose or thought, until it is brought from its natural place into reality as you know it. To you, it is hate. Hate without end or ending. Hatred for you and your kind.”
“Uh huh,” I mused, surprisingly not surprised. Honestly, I didn’t have the capacity for an existential crisis right now. So there was a thing from the beyond that wanted humanity dead, supposedly for something we had done. That concept was not entirely new to me. We’d always had an “all go, no quit, advancement at whatever cost” nature. Honestly, the fact that it had taken us this long to pick up an enemy of this caliber was the real surprise.
I’d deal with the implications of the threat later, on my own time, when I wasn’t staring at a holographic woman I’d made a promise to. “So, am I to assume the black stuff is the Scourge’s actual form?”
“In this universe, yes,” Nali answered.
“Can it be destroyed?” I probed.
Her body burst open to reveal a horror show of bones and teeth, blood and viscera. She screamed in the voice of a thousand different forms of life. Then she reformed herself, suddenly the Nali I’d known before.
“Y-Yes, Ch- Ch- Chos- Ryan,” Nali whimpered. “In theory. The light of the Maelstrom in this universe is u-uniquely suited to do so. In practice, no. There is no hope for you or any that live here to destroy the Scourge. When the planet was transported here, the scouring of the surface came close, but the Scourge burrowed deep, into the spaces where light cannot touch. In a billion years, when all life on Ralqir is gone, it will serve as a trap to capture and convert sentient life that enters its domain. Then it will continue, on and on, until this universe is dead.”
Jassin looked from me to the hologram, his eyes calculating. He had to have been bristling with how unable he was to understand our conversation. I summarized as best I could.
The headmaster went a shade paler when I got to the part about it being nestled in the deep places of the world.
“Well, that precludes us from ever going home as the dragons wish.” He sighed. He looked genuinely sad to say the words. “Outside the Maelstrom, there would be nothing stopping it from overrunning the surface, too. We will need to be forever vigilant, lest our planet be plunged into another cataclysm. This time we lost a province. Next time it could easily be everything.”
I nodded, reluctant to speak. Someone had stolen my breath in the precise moment I finally realized what had to be done.
“We’ll be back,” I said to Nali, then grabbed Jassin’s arm and shuffled us both back to where the others were waiting.
Geddon clasped my prosthetic hand in a grip that rivaled even my Ability-enhanced one, then crushed me in an enormous bear (cat?) hug. “I will always cherish our time together, Ryan.” The Leori sniffled. “We’ve spilled so much blood together, I feel like I’m losing a brother today. A blood-spilling brother.”
“Hey!” I gasped as he squeezed the air out of me. “Just, uh, remember who gave you your sword before you became a warrior of legend, yeah?”
“Oh, I’ll remember,” he said, lowering me down so he could caress the hilt of his chain-sword lovingly. “I’ll make sure they pronounce your name correctly in the ballads.”
“Please do not.” Kolash burped. “It will be hard enough to keep a second fulcrum a secret without random bards spreading tales of it all.”
Trix was next, flanked by Tiba, who was still holding his hand. The little vulpa’s ears drooped sadly along with his whiskers, and his rifle hung low on his hip. He was having a hard time meeting my eyes, but when he looked back at the goblin queen, he did that head-to-tail shudder thing.
“Thank you, Ryan,” Trix said, his voice cracking. “Thank you for … uh …” He seemed to lose his words mid-sentence.
I got down on one knee and ruffled his fur playfully. “No. Thank you for being my friend and for sticking with me when you learned the truth. Not to mention having my back on and off the battlefield. You saved my life, Trix. You’re a great warrior,” I said, my voice threatening to give out. “And a greater man.”
Trix did find the courage to meet my gaze then, eyes wide in shock. Then the dam broke. He dashed under my arm to give me a full-body hug. “Don’t go setting yourself on fire again without me there,” he mumbled into my shirt.
“Never!” I laughed, looking up from my vulpa buddy to Tiba. “Take care of this little guy, will you?”
Tiba nodded regally. “He’s a goblin knight now. First Rifle. He never wants for anything long as I live. I promise.” Then she slipped underneath my other arm and squeezed me as well.
Next was Beedy, who simply slapped me on the shoulder and grinned. He was looking a lot better after having gotten some treatment from the Church healers the army had brought with them. Even his smile was brighter.
Sissa and Bole came up as a pair. Bole was grinning from ear to ear, while Sissa had a more somber expression. “Take care of yourself, Ryan,” Sissa said. “And try to think before you do things. For me. Not every battle requires a noble sacrifice, and I’d feel a lot better if I knew you’d taken that lesson to heart.”
“Sure. I’ll work on that.” I waggled my finger between the two of them. “So, you two, uh, you’re—”
“Yep!”
“Absolutely not.”
The two of them answered at the same time before looking at each other, an argument forming between them like a bank of storm clouds.
“No, we’re not,” Sissa insisted, eyes narrowed, daring the shorter man to contradict her. “I just don’t think he’s as vile as he tried to convince himself he was all these years. I may be wrong.”
