One a more sinister note. A gold ranker with the Atmospheric Compressor and Metal Density sigils dragged in a vampire. Turns out that they don’t hand adventurers with excessive defenses well. We strapped it to a table, I will be happy to watch Dr. Phisher pull it apart. For science of course.
Day 103, Owen Landers
Silas staggered as all his energy vanished along with the need. His hand found the shredded remains of his armor. Something torn and squishy met his fingers. Food, he needed food to fuel flesh lord. Turning he tried to walk to the beholder’s corpse.
Warning: Jikininki will revive in ten minutes if not purified.
Cursing, Silas turned back. There was no way he could handle the dragonkin chief if it managed to revive. He was certain that it wouldn’t make the mistake of chomping on Silas a second time.
Every footstep hurt, using his core muscles for anything sent pulses of dull agony through his body. Thankfully, the chief was not far away. Instead of kneeling, he simply collapsed, falling across the scaled corpse.
Notice: You have made contact with spirit manifestation Schemat Pugnator. Would you like to purify the taint of Nimrod?
This one lacked the prefix humilis, so Silas assumed that Jikininki was what Nimrod expected the bulk of his fighters to grow into. That was horrifying. Silas was certain that it was possible for humans to grow to the point of being able to kill them, but they were not there yet. He gave the go ahead to purify and was surrounded by putrid smoke.
Another notification popped up, and Silas pushed it aside. A second followed on its heels, and if it hadn’t been a warning, he would have ignored it as well.
Warning: Portal anchor has been lost. Find a new anchor or the portal will destabilize in ten minutes.
Of course, it wouldn’t just leave him time to rest. Silas promised himself that he would find the CEO of Commune Inc. and punch him in the face. The least he could do was make his tech easy to navigate. That or warn the users of how their choices could affect them.
Placing his hand on the dragonkin, he tried to leverage himself upright. He failed. His body weight, gear, and missing hand conspired to make it impossible for Silas to rise. Should he start crawling, what about Samantha and Bella? With great effort, he turned his head and saw Aron grabbing Bella under her arms.
The twins hadn’t been part of the fight. Silas felt a mixture of hope and frustration boil up in him. While they could get Samantha and Bella out, it was only because they had been too cowardly to fight. No, Silas corrected himself, it was not cowardly for civilians to avoid violence. It was something that would need to change if they wanted to thrive on the wreckage of Earth.
“Mr. Silas,” an unfamiliar voice said before pushing something that smelled delicious in front of his nose.
Glancing up, he saw Mandy. She had one of the beholder's tentacles. The burned end told Silas that it had been torn off in the chieftain’s final explosion. He didn’t hesitate, tearing his helmet off, grabbing the limb, and shoving it into his mouth. It really should have been disgusting, the meat had the texture of hot rubber, with pockets of crunchy teeth, and grape like eyeballs. Nothing had ever tasted better.
“Thank you,” Silas said when he finally came up for air. He intended to say more, but he could feel the moment flesh lord received the necessary fuel.
He twitched and groaned as perforated organs twisted back into place. Saying it was painful would have been incorrect. It didn’t hurt, in fact, the reduction in pain as things were put back where they were supposed to be was almost pleasant. The uncomfortable part was feeling the organs slide over each other.
None of it stopped Silas from shoving the rest of the tentacle into his face. When he was done licking his fingers, he looked down expectantly at his arm. There was no new hand. The skin had healed into a stump and that stump extended a bit as he watched. It would take a few days on a diet of beholder to finish regrowing, maybe a week or two on a normal diet.
“Mr. Silas, we need to go,” Mandy said more urgently.
“Huh,” He said dumbly, “Oh, yeah, the portal. Could you get Samantha, I’ll get the bodies.”
While a more logical person might have focused on resources, Silas wasn’t willing to leave Batu and Rehka here to rot. He added Mia to that tally, she had fallen from a large number of wounds sometime during their final fight.
Silas left Mandy to go get Samantha while he focused on picking up the larger bodies specifically Batu. He was certain Mandy and Aron would be willing to carry their father, but he refused to burden the two young people with hauling Batu’s corpse out.
He took several stumbling steps before his sigils finished stitching his body back together. He took another bite of beholder flesh to speed up the process, and those shaky steps became steadier as he approached Batu’s lifeless form. It felt wrong to be standing healthy with few marks of their ordeal on his body while Batu had died. Silas had even managed to drain most of the venom coursing through his body along with his blood.
Silas knelt beside the man. He was one of the bravest people he had ever seen. Batu had fought to the bitter end for his children and paid the ultimate price. His skin was pale from blood loss, and several limbs were clearly broken. Silas reached over and wrapped his fingers around the sword pinning Batu to the ground.
He waited for Mandy and Aron to step through the portal with Bella and Samantha before drawing it free. He didn’t want them to see their father as he pulled the jagged blade free. He glanced around finding a broken couch. Wiping the blade clean on it, he sheathed it across his back.
“I know you can’t hear me,” Silas muttered, “but thank you for your sacrifice. None of us would be alive without it.”
Batu had bought the crucial seconds it took for the poison to begin acting on the dragonkin’s body. Without those seconds, Silas would’ve died and the dragon might’ve lived long enough to finish everyone else off.
Awkwardly, Silas slid his hand beneath Batu’s shoulders and braced his other arm under the man’s legs. It was difficult with only one hand, Batu was not small by any means, and the limpness of death made it worse. While he was difficult to balance, he still felt light. Almost like a toy.
A grim thought crossed Silas’s mind. Is this what life would be like in the coming years? Everyone ending up expendable or having their worth judged by personal power? He hoped not.
He checked the countdown for the portal’s stabilization. Seven minutes left. Enough time to get the other bodies as well.
Stepping through, he was almost blinded by the sun. It had been so long since he’d seen the celestial body that he froze. It was set into an impossibly blue sky. Silas paused on the opposite side of the portal as tears formed in his eyes. He was back home. Well, not quite home. But closer than he’d been in a long, long time.
He took a shaky breath and stepped into the debris around the portal. The wreckage of the neighborhood that had originally been here was scattered everywhere. Thankfully there were no dragonkin. Likely they had all been present to participate in their god’s hunt.
A quick inspection of the Delhi skyline showed that the city was in shambles. Several skyscrapers had collapsed, taking out surrounding blocks. The neighborhood they’d landed in was upper-middle-class once, but it had clearly seen better days. Silas looked around for a place to set Batu down. There was no good spot. Wreckage and debris covered the area, collapsed houses, torn-up lawns, and shattered fountains. He settled on a section of wall that had somehow stayed intact even as it fell over.
He laid Batu on the wall, it looked like some kind of stucco, and stood. After a quick glance at the twins, Silas stepped back through the portal.
He found Rekha’s body next. It was a mess, with blood leaking from every orifice, only just beginning to dry. Silas scooped her up and carried her toward the portal. He could feel bones shifting in unnatural ways. While he knew it wasn’t his fault, Silas couldn’t help but feel responsible for the mental invasion and painful death she had experienced.
Aron’s voice cracked as he confronted Silas when he returned to earth, “Why did you bring her? She’s the reason we were attacked in the first place. She’s the reason my father’s dead. You should leave her. She doesn’t deserve respect.”
Silas raised an eyebrow. He was sure the outburst came from trauma, but he answered anyway, “You do realize both of you would be dead if she hadn’t stalled the dragonkin as long as she did. I think we owe her at least a burial. You don’t have to respect her, but please respect the fact that I do.”
Aron didn’t look satisfied, but there wasn’t much he could do. Silas set Rekha down on the slab beside Batu and then went back through the portal once more to retrieve Mia. Her body was torn up badly. He’d seen mutilated corpses before, he’d skinned animals for years and most of them looked better than she did. He picked her up and placed her beside Rekha. Given more time he would have grabbed Lehka and Connor’s remains as well. However, his portaling distance was too short and he didn’t have time to make a box for Connor’s bones.
For a moment he contemplated making a dash for the portal to grab a few more sigils, he was certain he could get a handful of thermal cultivators, or maybe one of the beholder’s tentacles. However, a glance at the timer told him that his window was closing fast. If there was one thing he refused to risk, it was being trapped in hell again.
That reminded him that he had notifications to go through, including one offering a technique. Whatever that meant. He had been ignoring those notifications for a while and would continue doing so until he had more time.
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Silas watched the final seconds tick down as whatever power supported the portal collapsed. The suppression on his portal sigil vanished with it, returning his natural three mile range. There was something different about these portals, they connected planets or dimensions and would close regardless of whether something was using them or not.
A groan pulled him from his thoughts. Looking over he saw Bella was sitting up, rubbing her jaw and working it back and forth. With a wince and a jerk, she popped it back into place. The fact that a dislocated jaw only achieved a wince told Silas that their pain scales were skewed. She spat out a tooth and groaned again.
“Did we win?” she asked, blinking up at the blue sky. “We won.” She tried to lift her arms in celebration but wound up winded, collapsing back onto her side.
Silas nodded with a smile, “Yeah. We won. We’re back on Earth. Finally.”
Bella looked awful, a massive bruise swallowed half her face and her left eye was bloodshot. Still, she looked pretty good considering that the chief had hit her hard enough to instantly kill a normal human. The combination of Greater Hearth Conserver’s preservation effect and her enhanced body had saved her quite a bit of pain. As for the tooth, he was pretty sure he could put it back. Bone was his specialty after all.
Bella’s face tightened with panic as she remembered her daughter. “Sammy, where’s Sammy?”
Silas nodded toward the girl. “She’s hurt, but she’ll be fine.”
Bella looked to where Silas gestured. Laboriously, she moved to her daughter’s side. Samantha’s broken arm was on the nastier side of breaks. While it was bad, Silas felt that it was something she would recover from. Her compressed air armor had done its job. Without it, she would’ve looked a lot like Rehka.
Silas looked around at the ruined city. I wonder if there are people nearby, hopefully they have some healers. Some sigils allowed for healing. He’d even had one before the dragonkin looted his belongings. Those sigils would be in absurdly high demand, in fact, he was surprised if the monsters were still alive on earth. Humans had a habit of causing the extinction of anything that valuable.
He could theoretically meld Samantha’s bones back together with Bone Crafter. However, Silas assumed the pain would be unimaginable. Warping living bone was invasive in a way he couldn’t justify when Samantha’s vitality and a splint should take care of the problem in a week or two.
“Mandy, Aron,” Silas called. The twins had been standing off to the side, unsure what to do. His father had always told him, If you are dealing with loss, you have two options, grieve properly or stay busy. Silas didn’t know the first thing about proper grieving, but he could keep them busy, “Can you two look for a shovel? I’m going to look around for something, too. Maybe we can make a headstone out of bone or make one out of wood.”
Aron shook his head. “I don’t think we should bury them. We should burn them.”
Silas blinked. He wasn’t entirely sure what Mongolian funeral traditions were supposed to be, but he hadn’t expected that.
He didn’t want to offend, so he asked, “Do you have any traditions you want honored? Or do you want us to build a wood pyre and lay them on top?”
Aaron sighed. “We had no traditions. My father worked for the underworld and I was a college student in America. Crime and America are good at grinding away at anything traditional.”
Silas nodded. Fair enough. America was good at confusing its college students, “Very well, I’ll start collecting firewood. Everyone else can prep the area. Mandy, do you want help gather wood?”
The girl shook her head, “No. This is the last time I’ll see my father.”
Silas nodded and began hauling any wood he could get his hands on. He started building it up into a platform that they could rest the body on. It didn’t matter if the wood was green or half-rotten. With the thermal cultivator sigil both twins carried, they’d be able to ramp the temperature high enough to burn anything. They probably didn’t even need fire, but burning their own father with their bare hands was a line Silas wasn’t going to ask them to cross.
While he worked, he finally checked his notifications.
Four separate sigil advancement messages, more than he had ever seen at a single time. The first was for Flesh Lord due to keeping a toxin in his system for so long. It gave him a boost in Vitality.
The next was for Bone Crafter. Evidently working with carapace instead of bone to make bows and tools had earned him another upgrade and a Wisdom bonus, something he desperately needed. To him, wisdom and judgment went hand-in-hand, and someone with low Wisdom was at risk of being ruled by their emotions.
And finally, two levels from Portal Manipulator. One for hauling the beholder and centi snake through his portals. The second came from defeating a portal anchor, whom he assumed to be the dragonkin chief, and escaping to Earth. He wasn’t sure how that one worked as his portal sigil had been suppressed during the entire event. He wasn’t turning down free progress.
The final message was the strangest as it was both a reward and a threat.
Notice: Congratulations. You have defeated Nimrod’s chosen instrument and escaped Sheol. For doing so, you have earned a technique based on your talent and the method you used to secure victory.
You used Bone Crafter to create armor and weapons that damaged your enemies. These included bows, blades, armor, and survival tools. You armed yourself and your allies over the course of your trial, saving each of their lives on multiple occasions.
Technique: Soul Infusion. Anytime you use Bone Crafter to create an object, you may also infuse an unabsorbed sigil you possess into the craft to create unique outcomes.
I have seen you, and I expect much. To whom much is given, much is expected. To whom much is entrusted, much will be demanded.
Warning: Nimrod has been angered by your escape. He has tasked his followers with slaying you. His herald has been dispatched to finish the hunt. Few escape the Master of Schemes.
Silas blinked at the warning. It was strange in multiple ways and not only because it came nestled inside another notification. He wasn’t sure what was worse, that Nimrod was sending what amounted to a super dragonkin after him or that the interface was starting to sound like a messenger for a divine entity.
There was simply no way that Commune Inc. would give this much information. More likely they would have just sent a notice including the technique’s name and expected him to figure out the rest.
It didn’t take long to gather the materials. Because Aron and Mandy still weren’t fond of Rekha, they ended up making two separate pyres, one for the pair of Indian women, and another for the father of the twins. Samantha woke up in that time and Bella helped her make a sling to not jostle the broken arm.
Silas had never burned a body before. He wasn’t entirely sure how it normally worked, but he was fairly certain that in most situations the body didn’t burn completely to ash. That probably wouldn’t be true here. Thermal Cultivator would make this fire burn far hotter than normal.
The twins lit a small portion of their father’s pyre first. The wood was mostly wet, so it didn’t burst into flames the way a proper pyre would. What it did allow was for them to heat a piece of metal in the smoldering patch until it hit somewhere around four hundred degrees. When it was hot enough, they pulled it free, boosted the temperature with their sigil, and shoved it back into the center. That was enough to ignite the wet wood and underbrush. After a few pieces of glowing orange metal were tossed into the wood, the fire really started up.
Bella repeated the same process for Rekha and Maya’s pyre, then stepped back, giving the twins a moment alone with their father. Silas kept watch, anxious that the smoke would draw more monsters.
It wasn’t something he had considered when he was collecting wood. Wet wood tended to produce more smoke due to the water being converted to vapor and dragging ash with it as it rose. At least that was what Silas assumed was going on. While thin ribbons of smoke rose from various points around the ruined city, none of them were as tall or as heavy as the pair they’d just created.
Samantha sat down beside him, “You know, it feels weird being home.”
Silas glanced down at the twelve-year-old. “Really? How so? I figured you were still a long way from home.”
He hadn’t considered what he would do if they made it out of Hell alive. What was he supposed to do with them? Would he go all the way back to Australia for Bella and Samantha first? Or try to get the twins home to Mongolia? His initial plan had been straightforward - break through a portal to earth, reach whatever port would take them across whatever ocean he needed to cross, land in America, and then run from the coast to the Midwest as fast as possible. He had made that plan in his first weeks in Hell and hadn’t really updated it.
Silas wanted to get back to Abby. Now that he had made the first step, he itched to take the second. However, he wasn’t going to abandon Bella and Samantha, not in a foreign country, not surrounded by people who could easily take advantage of an injured mother and child. Yes, after a few weeks of healing and with proper gear they could defend themselves, but they were still two vulnerable people stranded in a nation where they didn’t understand the language or culture.
Silas didn’t feel right leaving them to fate.
Samantha shook her head. “No it’s not that. It just doesn’t feel like home. I don’t know, the purple sky was fun. It was scary, but without the fear, won’t life just be bland?”
“Bland?” Silas frowned, “What do you mean?”
She shrugged, eyes fixed on the twin plumes of smoke. “Just, after everything that happened, it feels like the hard part of life is already over. Like nothing really matters, the important stuff is over.”
Silas huffed a quiet laugh, he had almost forgotten that Samantha wasn’t even a teenager stage. He wondered what her rebellious stage would be like. Then he shuddered, teenagers with superpowers.
He ruffled Samantha’s hair, “Kid, just because you went through something hard doesn’t mean life is over. If anything, I’d say your life’ll be more colorful. You’ll value it more than most people your age.”
“But is there really much to see here?” Samantha asked, trying and failing to slap Silas’s hand away, “After being in a different world?”
Silas couldn’t help smiling. “Oh, trust me, there’s plenty to see in this one.”
Bella finished lighting the second pyre and joined them, sitting on Silas’s other side.
“So,” she asked, “what are we doing now?”
Silas rubbed his chin. “I’ve been thinking about that. I can’t just head home without making sure you two are all right. We need to get you back to Australia.”
He knew that India and Australia were relatively close on a globe, but that distance was still likely a few thousand miles. Could he use his portals to expedite the journey? With portals, he could move at one hundred twenty miles an hour. With a compass and a canoe that would be a two or three day trip.
Bella placed a hand on Silas’s shoulder, “That's kind of you, but don’t worry about us.”
Silas frowned, “Don’t you have any family in Australia? I know we’d need a boat to get there, but everything in hell seems wary of water, so it shouldn’t be impossible.”
Bella shrugged. “Not really. Yes, my husband’s family lives there, but…” She sighed, “Standard in-law issues. They despise me. I was raised in an orphanage, so aside from them there’s not much for me back home. You’re more family than any of them are.”
Silas felt a bit of guilt at the relief that filled him when Bella said she was an orphan. Her saying they were like family took him by surprise. Many soldiers called each other brother and would die for them. Silas smiled at the revalation, hardship had a way of bringing people together.
Still, he needed to clarify, “So you don’t want to go back to Australia?”
Bella leaned against a slab of collapsed wall. “It’s not that I don’t want to. I have friends, some of them feel like a part family. But I don’t have any responsibilities that force me back right now. I can just stick with you, get stronger, and return later if I need to. You are Sammy’s best shot at growing up with all her limbs attached,” She looked at Silas’s arm while holding up her stump, “ What I’m saying is that I’m not tied down.”
“What makes you so sure I would be better than the government with military backing?” Silas asked.
“Have you checked the ranking boards for physical and mental abilities?” Bella asked.
That had completely slipped his mind. Quickly he opened his interface and moved to the army addendum. Interestingly, the leadership list had filled out with his name at the top followed by Bella, Samantha, Aron, and finally Mandy. He supposed that did match the command structure they would have if one were formalized.
He moved on to the second list. Previously, it had one hundred name slots, but he had only ever seen nine of them filled. Now all one hundred slots were filled, and it didn’t look good.
Physical
- Silas (17)
- Arabella (16)
- Vikram (10)
- Rahul (8)
- Samantha (7)
Mental
- Silas (21)
- Samantha (11)
- Rahul (11)
- Arabella (10)
- Durga (9)
The first thing that came as a surprise was that Samantha had hit ten capacity. She had a personal sigil. As she had exactly twelve additional points, it would still be at stage one.
The second thing he saw was that Rahul was the only local person with a personalized sigil. He had expected to be fairly high up there on the mental board, Portal Manipulator and Bone Crafter both preferred those stats after all. The fact that Samantha was top five in the physical list was an issue, the bottom person on the list only had five in physical.
“All right then,” Silas said, having his head in disappointment, “No reason to stay here so guess we’re heading to America. We’ll find my wife, make sure she’s okay, and then we’ll get you back to Australia when we’re able to get around to it.”
Bella nodded, then tilted her head toward the twins. “What about them?”
Silas blinked. “What about them?”
He didn’t dislike the twins, they simply hadn’t had the time to build the same connection he had with Bella and Samantha. He’d known them for less than a week. They weren’t antagonistic, but they also hadn’t shared enough experiences for Silas to feel any bond of responsibility toward them.
“The simplest path,” he said, thinking aloud, “would be going straight north, through China, up into Mongolia where we can drop them off. Then take the ice bridge from Russia into Alaska. From there we move down through Canada to the U.S.”
Bella nodded, “With how cold it is up there, we won’t have any trouble.” She paused. “But… how do you think our temperature sigil is going to work in negative temperatures? Positive or negative?”
Samantha frowned, “I don’t know. I want to say it’ll warm us up, but if you multiply a negative, it just gets more negative.”
Silas snorted, “Well, I guess we’ll find out.” He shook his head. “Never thought I’d end up seeing Russia. At least, not outside of a war.”
He felt a bit giddy. Sure he was still half a planet from home, but that was a planet and a half closer than he was before. At this pace, he should be back home within the year.