Chapter 57: What Was the Rush?
Once I’d turned Alice’s question over from every angle, until it finally gave me something — a conclusion I preferred to keep to myself until I had proof of it — I got back to my feet.
It was time to choose.
I looked around at that endless sea of ancient relics, those rows of display stands receding until they dissolved into the white, and a thoroughly petty thought crossed my mind.
Isn’t all this a waste?
Why settle for one? All these marvels had been sleeping here for who knew how many centuries without anyone putting them to use, and the tower intended to let me walk out with one, a single one, while it watched me leave the rest behind. It wanted heroes capable of facing this world? Then let it arm us to the teeth and be done with it.
Fine.
It was worth a try, at least.
I stepped up to the nearest stand, slid my fingers under the rim of the glass dome, and lifted.
It came away without the slightest resistance. The glass rose as though it had never been fastened at all, and the relic beneath it — a dagger with a bone handle — lay there, offered, within easy reach.
I closed my fingers around it.
[ Fang of Sédrile — Epic ]
Well now.
Nothing happened. No alarm, no invisible hand to stop me, no indignant window. The dagger sat in my palm like any ordinary object, and the hall stayed perfectly silent.
So I took two steps to the left, lifted the next dome, and took a second one.
[ Bracer of Norn — Rare ]
A relic in each hand, I stood there a moment waiting for the punishment.
[ The number of relics allotted per hero is fixed at one unit. You are currently holding two. ]
[ Any relic in excess will be removed upon validation of your choice. Please retain only one object. ]
No outrage, no reproach, nothing but an administrative statement delivered above my head with all the enthusiasm of a form letter.
I looked at the dagger, then the bracer, then the windows.
And if I hold on to both until the end?
[ Any relic in excess will be removed upon validation of your choice. ]
The same message. Word for word. Without a single degree more in the voice, assuming the thing had a voice at all.
I put the bracer back. I put the dagger back. I set both domes into place, one after the other, with the diligent care of someone hoping nobody saw a thing.
Worth a try.
Right. Since there would only be one, I might as well think calmly about which.
I started walking down the aisle again, hands in my pockets, and took stock of what I already had.
Worldflow gave me mobility, that way of pouring myself into a movement and slipping out of a trajectory before it found me. The Arsenal gave me volume, water in quantity, raw versatility. Apotheosis gave me endurance, or rather the absence of fatigue, which came to the same thing in practice.
Which was already a great deal.
What I didn’t have, on the other hand, was a way to hit hard. Not hard in the sense that I could stack up ten lances and release them at once — hard in the sense that a single blow changes a situation. Against the giant, it had taken the three of us building a lance of plasma to vaporize a stationary target, and it had taken thirteen loops to get there. Against Lazaüs, my cuts were pinpricks on a man in armor.
And there was the other gap, the one I’d been thinking about since I watched Seorin get cut in half.
Alice could stitch me back together after just about anything. She’d scraped me off a wall, put me back on my feet before I hit the ground, closed wounds I hadn’t even felt open.
But she could do nothing for a dead man.
If a beam like that one ever caught me square, if a blow went through me instead of wounding me, there would be no healing to receive. And going by what this world had shown me so far, that day would come.
So: something to hit once hard enough that it counts. Or something to survive once what ought to kill me.
There was my criterion. Better than nothing.
I resumed my walk, and the windows opened before me one after another.
[ Lance of Yggdrasil — Mythic ]
Cut from a branch of the world-tree itself, it is still alive beneath the bark and answers to whoever feeds it. +50% agility, +25% strength, +25% mana, and grants the skill [Yggdrasil’s Growth] (active): the wood lengthens or retracts at the bearer’s will for as long as they keep pouring mana into it.
I stopped dead.
What?
What? No, seriously — what?
A lance made from the world-tree, able to extend and retract at will, therefore usable in close quarters and at range alike, which solved in one stroke the problem of versatility I sorely lacked the moment an opponent decided to stay airborne. And on top of that, a hundred percent in cumulative stats.
A hundred percent.
Naia and Laia, my two lunar-steel sabers that I was so proud of, offered two percent agility and two percent strength. Set beside this thing, they weren’t even ridiculous anymore — they were invisible.
I stayed in front of the case a while, contemplating it like a kid at a shop window.
Then I sighed.
Because I wasn’t a spearman. I’d never held a lance in my life, my entire style rested on two short blades and on the way Worldflow carried me from one foothold to the next, and walking out with this marvel would amount to walking out with a magnificent concert piano I could play three notes on. The percentages would apply, presumably. The rest would be pure waste.
So I moved on.
Aisle after aisle, case after case, I read every line of these relics, each more absurd than the last.
[ Aegis of Vhalor — Legendary ]
Shield of a captain who held a breach alone for three days, and who they say never gave a single step. +30% vitality, +20% strength, and grants [Anchor] (active): as long as the bearer does not move, they cannot be driven back, and the impacts they absorb are halved.
[ Tideloops — Epic ]
Two rings of tarnished silver that still carry the sound of the sea when brought near the ear. +20% mana, +10% intelligence, and grants [Ebb] (passive): a portion of the mana spent returns to the bearer after a few seconds.
[ Mantle of a Hundred Nights — Legendary ]
Dark cloth sewn by an order of watchmen of which nothing remains, so thin it fits in a closed hand. +30% agility, +20% perception, and grants [Eclipse] (active): the bearer becomes undetectable to the senses and to detection magic for as long as they strike no blow.
That one I looked at longer than the others.
Then I thought of Alice, of how she’d react if I became able to disappear at will, and I moved along with the distinct sense of having dodged something.
I noticed the empty pedestals a little farther on.
They were scattered through the aisles with no apparent logic, stands identical to the others except that the glass dome rested on a bare plate. Some still bore a trace, a hollow in the velvet, the mark of an object that had sat there a very long time.
The ancients came through before me.
Chloé, Isaiah, Adam, Hannah. Each of them must have faced a first trial different from ours, in a setting I couldn’t begin to imagine, against things I’d never hear a word about — and yet each of them had ended up here, in this hall, walking between these same rows before leaving with an object no one would ever see again.
I wondered what Isaiah had taken. That half-melted shield that had absorbed eight blades of darkness, maybe. Or that sword trailing a dark aura behind it.
Then another thought came to me, and that one I could have done without.
They were all dead.
Isaiah, Adam, Hannah, and all those before them of whom nothing remained but these hollows in the velvet. Each had crossed their trial, each had walked here exactly as I was doing, each had weighed the lines and the percentages telling themselves that this choice would see them through to the end of their journey.
And it had changed nothing. The world had carried them off all the same, at some point, somewhere, relic in hand.
It put my little deliberation in perspective. I could spend hours comparing numbers: of everyone who had come to choose in this hall before me, not one had survived it.
I moved on to the next case.
And there, my rhythm broke.
[ Oath of Vashiel — Mythic ]
A plain ring, without ornament, worn by a woman whose name no one recorded but who crossed an army to reach her brother. +20% to all statistics, and grants [One Step More] (passive): the first time a blow would take the bearer’s life, they remain standing, their breath intact, and the relic goes dark for good.
I read it several times over.
Once. Only once. Then the ring dies in my place and becomes a piece of metal.
That was exactly the second item on my list. The gap no healing of Alice’s could close, the one thing she could do nothing about.
With that, I was allowed one mistake. A real one. A beam going through me, a blade I don’t see coming, a little girl with red eyes deciding that gravity will be worth ten times as much in this precise spot. Once, I would stay standing.
Twenty percent across the board, on top of it.
My hand stayed resting on the case for a long moment.
Then my gaze slid to the next one, two meters away, and I understood it wasn’t going to be that simple.
[ Heart of the Dead Forge — Mythic ]
A shard of a hearth where only one blade was ever beaten, and which went cold the day it was finished. +25% mana, and grants [Single Ember] (active): the bearer may charge the relic for as long as they wish, each accumulated moment multiplying the power of their next attack, up to a ceiling no one has ever reached. The charge dissipates if the bearer is struck.
And there’s the first item.
It wasn’t an object that struck in my place. It was an object that took what I already did and multiplied it — and I knew exactly what that would look like, because I’d seen it.
The lance of plasma. That thing the three of us had taken thirteen loops to build, which had vaporized the torso of a thirty-meter colossus and carried on its course until it drove a high demon backward. Picture the same thing, charged. Picture what that gives with a multiplier on it.
Except you had to hold the charge. Not be touched, not once, for the entire duration of the accumulation. Against an enemy who’s hunting you, that would mean needing someone to take the hits in my place — a tank, a shield, a woman who doesn’t stay dead.
One lets me survive what should kill me. The other lets me kill what shouldn’t die.
I stood between the two cases, looking back and forth.
Then, without really thinking about it, I started looking for something else.
It was the old author’s reflex, the one I couldn’t shut up. Because in this kind of story — and I’d written enough of them to know — the obvious choice is never the right one. The hero doesn’t walk out with the sword that shines. He walks out with the dull pebble sitting at the back of the third row, the one whose description fits into a single obscure line, and three hundred Chapters later the reader discovers that pebble held a god.
So I spent the following hours hunting for the pebble.
I read swords that cut mana, rings that doubled the reach of spells, boots that made running silent, a grimoire containing twelve breaths of which eleven were lost, an amulet that refused poisons, a quiver that returned its arrows, a lesser crown whose entire description fit into one sentence I couldn’t make sense of. Rare, Epic, Legendary, and every so often a Mythic sitting there as if it were nothing.
They were all tempting.
Not one made me say that’s the one.
And since I had time, for once in my life, I decided to take it.
I lay down right there on the floor, in the middle of the aisle, arms and legs spread like a starfish, and stared up at that white ceiling that never ended.
What was the rush?
No one was waiting for me. No one was dying while I lay there. There was no wave on the walls, no demon in the sky, no loop running, no decision to make within three seconds or watch someone get cut in half.
Nothing but white, and silence, and the very pleasant weight of having nothing to do.
So I let my mind wander off.
Far from this world I was supposed to save, far from the Calamities and their perfect king, far from the seven heroes and their fronts to hold, far from the responsibilities nobody had asked me whether I wanted to carry. Far from Alice too, from her smile and her unanswered questions and everything she might be hiding from me. Far from everything that weighed.
My eyelids grew heavy.
And of course, because I was apparently nothing but a walking cliché, that was precisely the moment a window opened in my field of vision.
I didn’t see it.
I was already in the arms of Morpheus.
[ Time remaining before random selection: 00:09:59 ]