Chapter 56: Volume 1- [ - 57 ]
The plot. The idiot’s plot. The narrative trap that the original novel had laid out — the one where the innocent healer encounters something she does not understand, asks the wrong person, and falls into a situation that spirals beyond her control. It was a trope. A cliché. A plot device so transparent that any reader would see it coming from three chapters away.
And it was happening. Right now. To me.
‘This is the plot of the idiot falling into the trap,’ I thought, and the amusement was a warm, golden thing that settled in my chest. ‘She is going to ask me what that white substance is. She is going to ask me directly. And I am going to—’
I nodded. Set Lira down gently on the bedroll. Covered her with the blanket. Stood.
But before I could follow Elwen, a voice cracked from behind me.
“Wait — do not go with him!”
Seraphine. She had sat up, the blanket falling from her shoulders, her face pale and flushed in equal measure, her yellow eyes wide with something that was not fear but was adjacent to it.
Then, catching herself, realizing how that sounded, she stammered: “Forgive me — Lady Elwen — I only meant — today my health is not right. I just —”
She covered herself with the blanket. Trembled. Curled into a ball.
Elwen narrowed her gaze. Looked at Seraphine. Looked at me. The suspicion was visible — a healer’s intuition, the instinct that said something was wrong, that the pieces did not fit, that the kind lord and the trembling tank and the one-legged woman and the white substance were part of a pattern she had not yet decoded.
“You must have done something to her,” Elwen said, her voice quiet but firm. “For her to fear—”
“What? Come on, girl — I did not—” I began, the protest warm, wounded, the protest of an innocent man.
“Wait — I—” Seraphine started from the blanket.
Before she could finish, the blast hit.
A detonation — distant but powerful, the sound rolling across the hills like thunder, the flash visible even through the trees. The ground trembled. Birds erupted from the canopy. The horses whinnied and pulled at their tethers.
All of us — Seraphine, Elwen, the sisters, the carriage driver — turned toward the direction of the sound. East. Toward the hills. Toward the dungeon.
“Something has arrived,” Elwen said, her wand rising, the wood glowing faint green at the tip. “Something has happened there. Let’s go.”
We moved. Seraphine — despite her state, despite the flush and the trembling and the memory of what she had seen — was a soldier first. She grabbed her armor. Started pulling it on. Then stopped. Looked at the breastplate. At the white stain that she had not finished cleaning.
Her face went crimson. The internal voice was a scream:
‘The stain — if I wear this — they will see — they will ask — but I cannot go without armor — there could be combat — I—’
She put it on. The stain, partially cleaned, was still visible — a faint, opalescent smear across the silver breastplate, right over the heart. She would carry it into battle. His mark. On her armor. Over her heart.
I almost laughed.
‘Level 2 shop,’ I thought, climbing into the carriage, the sisters clinging to me, Elwen mounting her horse, Seraphine riding ahead with her stained armor and her burning face. ‘Opening it will not be tough at all.’
The dungeon entrance was a ruin.
Stone pillars — ancient, crumbling, covered in moss and the dark stains of corruption — flanked a dark opening in the hillside that belched smoke and the stench of monsters. The ground around the entrance was churned — footprints, blood, the scattered bodies of goblins that had been killed and not collected.
Four men stood outside. Adventurers — their gear mismatched, their faces dirty, their expressions ranging from fury to despair. Three of them were yelling. The fourth — the smallest, a woman in healer’s robes — was crying.
“How could you be so stupid?” The tallest man — a swordsman, his blade drawn, his face red — was screaming at the woman. “You blasted our explosive bag! By cooking food beside it! Who does that?”
“I am sorry — I am so sorry — I did not see — I thought the bag was — I was just trying to—”
The woman — the healer of their party — was on her knees. Her robes were dirty, her hair was a mess, her face was tear-streaked, and her hands were clasped in front of her chest in a gesture of desperate apology. She was small — shorter than Seraphine, shorter than Elwen, with mousy brown hair and soft brown eyes that were currently overflowing with tears.
“I am really unlucky,” she whispered, and the words were not an excuse but a statement of fact — a fundamental truth about herself that she had accepted the way a person accepts the weather.
‘I am really unlucky.’ Her internal voice confirmed it, the thought carrying the weight of long experience. ‘Every party I have joined has been killed. The first party — the Swords of Dawn — they said they needed a healer. They were kind. They forgave my mistakes. The first time, Marcus blamed me, but the others supported me. The second time, Marcus and Henrik blamed me, but Tomas supported me. The third time — all three blamed me. And now — the explosive bag — the dungeon — the goblins—’
The backstory was there, in her thoughts — a cascade of bad luck that followed her like a shadow. She had joined the Adventurer’s Guild three months ago. Since then, she had been in four parties. Three of them had been wiped out — not by her mistakes, not by incompetence, but by sheer, statistical improbability. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong quest. A monster surge that happened to coincide with their dungeon run. A structural collapse that happened the moment she stepped on the wrong stone. An explosive bag that happened to be placed beside the cooking fire.
She was not incompetent. She was not careless. She was simply — unlucky. Magnificently, spectacularly, cosmically unlucky. The kind of unlucky that made casinos close and insurance companies weep.
The goblins came.
They poured from the dungeon entrance — a wave of green-grey bodies, crude weapons, yellow eyes, the same corrupted strain I had encountered on the road. A dozen. Twenty. More.
“Fight — support us!” the swordsman yelled, raising his blade.
The healer woman trembled. Cast her buffs — the familiar green glow of enhancement magic washing over the three fighters, strengthening their arms, hardening their skin, accelerating their reflexes. She was good at this — the buffs were clean, precise, the work of a trained healer who knew her craft.
The fighters engaged. Steel met claw. Blood flew. The goblins screamed and died, but more came — always more, the dungeon spitting them out like a machine.
Ten minutes. The fight lasted ten minutes. When it ended, the ground was carpeted with goblin bodies, and the four adventurers were standing in the center of the carnage, their weapons bloody, their breathing ragged.
“Why the hell are there so many?” one of them — a man with an axe — panted. “We killed dozens. Dozens. And they keep coming.”
“The dungeon,” the swordsman said, looking at the dark entrance. “We have to clear it. Or they will destroy the nearby village.”