He can find something suited to acting as a hitching post, most certainly, so Tommy will not be able to sneak up on him.

As for the cave, it's more of a grotto, or at least it seems to be at first glance: its entrance is small, amidst some rocks, enough so that you could definitely miss it if you weren't looking for it and weren't walking so close to it, and it really doesn't look like it should actually lead anywhere. But if he dips his head down and crawls into it and walks a little bit further it'll eventually open up into a very large gallery, really wide and much longer than that, long enough that the light of Arik's torch cannot reach the other end. The floor is bare stone, dusty more than dirty, except for the trails of proper dirt that presumably-the-dead dragged in for whatever reason dead people may have to go into the place. These trails, too, lead far enough in that his light cannot see where.

Oh, ruins. These are often interesting.

What if he turns the brightness up on his torch-stick. Maybe sends out a couple of extra lights to explore the room. (He'd really like to see the walls - and any hidden enemies, since witchlight is so helpful that way - before going anywhere.)

There isn't, actually, anything else in this gallery, as far as he can tell. Various bits of the "room" are caved in, with mountains of rubble taller than he is here and there. They seem to be hiding absolutely nothing.

Fiiiiine, he'll follow the corpsetrails. There is probably going to be an angry demon at the end of all this and it will probably have laid some level of trap for him. This, as they say, Is Fine.

The cave gets colder, as these things do, the deeper in he goes. Cold enough that his breath starts fogging up, though of course not enough that there's any actual frost anywhere. Or perhaps it's just the lack of humidity. And maybe the cold isn't just physical. But This, as they say, Is (probably) Fine.

Right?

It takes some walking, but eventually he does find something that might be in want of punching or burning or slicing or whatever: a kind of spiritual being in the shape of a floating ball of purple flame, bobbing up and down in the air. It's not, directly, attacking him, per se, but it does seem to be doing something to him that doesn't feel very nice? Sort of psychologically? It's hard to say.

How does it feel, psychologically, about his sword, which is also more of a spiritual than a physical entity, stabbing it.

It does try to lunge for him when he does that, but it's not fast enough, and it dissipates without fanfare. And it does feel better.

Probably.

It probably feels better.

The cold is probably somewhat less cold.

Wait, no, that's nonsense, why would the cold be less cold? It's just as cold. Isn't it?

The fact that he is experiencing cold, when he was not only raised in a hut in the mountains-where-your-spit-freezes-before-hitting-the-ground but is wearing a magical necklace that has allowed him to run around naked in those very mountains, is deeply suspicious. He presses onward.

There are more spiritual beings. Some of them were hidden, and become visible when touched by the light of his torch; some didn't bother hiding, and just wander around aimlessly. Some have shapes, like fire, or paper, or flowers, or air—wait, is being shaped like air a thing?—while others are shapeless, a hint of existence just barely this side of awareness.

They're not ghosts, or not straightforward ones at least. It doesn't seem like they're haunting anything, except themselves. But they're spirits all the same.

And they don't attack him, usually. They just hang around, and feel bad to be around, and once he kills them he feels slightly less bad (probably). Not all, though, a couple do lunge at him and try to do something to him.

None are very strong. None seem to be trying very hard. None take very many stabs to dissipate into the air.

And it gets a little bit less cold each time, except for how it's still cold.

It doesn't really take a genius to figure out, which is good, because Arik is an idiot with a sword.

These things affect an area around themselves. As he approaches, things feel worse.

Things already feel bad, even when he's not near one.

But maybe he's near enough. To a really big one.

(That's, uh, been doing something with corpses. Animating them remotely, maybe? He kind of thought something was going to be eating them. But necromancy isn't exactly new either.)

This is going to suck, probably.

He sees the first of the corpses at the same time as he sees the light. The light is, actually, pretty difficult to see, at first; it's far, or so it seems, and it's small, and it could be a trick of his eyes, or just another flame spirit. But it's different. And a lot closer-by is a corpse, the first one he's seen so far (wait, he thought that before, didn't he?), and it's lying on the ground, staring up at the (tall, tall) ceiling with empty eyes filled with light. Are they empty or are they filled with light? There are eyes, and it seems like there may be light, but it's not really there, and not really light.

Except for that one light over there in the distance. That light is real. It's the only real thing, here, even more real than the floor, solid under his feet. It's more real than he is. Doesn't he want to see it? Doesn't he want to know what being real is like? What being light is like? What being like is light? What light like is being? Doesn't he?

In a blissful daze, he staggers forward. His mouth is half-open, his eyes half-closed; his hands are twitching at his sides.

Until he's within reach, at which point his eyes are open again and his hand closes around his sword, and he drives it home with all his strength.

His blade is stopped, and the thing makes itself visible all at once.

It's big.

It's humanoid, ish, though sort of shapeless and of bizarre proportions. Its head is about half the size of its torso, and it only has eyes, no nose or mouth or ears. Its arms are short and its hands are huge—one of them is holding a lantern at the end of a stick, and the other is holding Arik's sword between its fingers a little bit like a toothpick. It's dark purple and its eyes are black as the night sky and filled with a terrible light, and it's looking at him with a tilted head, as if confused.

Then it's trying to pull him up into the air by grabbing his sword, as if assuming it's a limb of his and he'll just go up with it.

At some point in this process, there was a miscalculation. Arik isn't sure at the moment where it was, because he needs to not die, and that means thinking later, and acting now.

First of all: his sword doesn't exist, especially not right now. His arms go right back down by his sides, and he jumps backwards and flings a knife at its eye. (The knife also doesn't exist, but right now it exists.)

The knife seems to surprise it more than anything. It does land, and it does sink into the thing's eye, but it's not acting like it particularly hurt. Then again, who knows how the body language of this kind of creature goes? Regardless, it turns to face him more fully, its head tilting to the other side, and then it moves the hand holding the lantern so that its light is between Arik and the creature—

The light is more than he is. More alive, more living, more vibrant and happy and joyous and real. Doesn't he want to know how the light feels? Doesn't he want to be with the light? Be in the light? Be the light?

Doesn't he?

D̵̝͎̈o̶͍͙̅ë̴̼̻́̅s̶̝̼̋́ñ̵̡̺̋'̸̣̦̑t̴̮͋͆ ̷̡̾͘h̵̢͆ḛ̵̩̊?̸̣̳͘

He's already taken a step forwards, before he wrests control back and turns on his heel to run.

The siren's song of the lantern isn't completely gone—having looked at it up close, it's clear that it's been calling to him since he stepped foot in this place, trying to worm its way into his thoughts—but it's a lot easier to resist when he's not looking directly at the light. But the lantern isn't the creature's only trick, and it can get surprisingly fast for its size (although how surprising is it, really, given that it's more spirit than matter?). It's soon bounding after Arik, the shadows its lantern casts swaying wildly as it bobs side to side and up and down.

These halls are indeed ruins, though of what is not a question they can answer. But this means that Arik's way isn't clear of obstacles, and there is much to stand in his way, doors and walls and crumbled rock. And at some point he must've gotten turned around, maybe distracted by the light, but the direction of the exit isn't obvious at all.

And he will find the corpses, as he runs, but at this point it might start becoming clear that they, too, were just bait. The corpses were not the point; attracting prey who would want to know where the corpses went was. And Arik is very much prey, right now.

Arik has ways of dealing with physical obstacles. It admittedly involves switching between a lot of fiddly states of mind, but fiddling with his own state of mind is about seventy percent of what he does. Leap over the wall. Move-like-that through the door. Switch, at one particularly lengthy stretch of rubble, to running along the walls - that one always gives him a headache, but headaches are survivable.

And, yeah, sure he got turned around. Fuck off with that fairy-hill bullshit. He's of half a mind to turn around and just fight the thing like a man, but. He would die. Badly. So he'll keep fucking running.

Despite how it's mostly a spirit, the thing does seem to have enough matter that when it tries to clip around a corner or through a doorway it mostly causes a ton of structural damage to its surroundings. And this becomes very relevant to Arik very soon when a wrong turn sends him into something akin to a dead end, and the creature crashes against a wall when trying to follow him which causes the wall between it and him to come crashing down into more rubble.

On the bright side, the thing can't squeeze into the hole Arik's found himself in. On the less bright side, he is in fact. Kind of trapped. Right now.

Some would take being trapped like a rat in a... rat trap... as cause for despair.

Arik thinks of it as more of a grace period, in which to figure out what in the living, breathing fuck he is doing.

He can't hurt the lantern-spirit meaningfully - or at least, not enough to take it down. Maybe if he knew more of the Art; maybe if he worked out how to bathe his sword in holy fire, like he sometimes dreams about.

He dreamed about the healing magic, too. Before he could do it.

He was dying when it came to him. His necklace hadn't been enough to keep him upright, and he lay there choking on his own blood, and he felt his hand reach toward his own chest. And he rose, on shaky feet, hurting all over but alive. It was like a miracle, in his hour of direst need.

Father of the Sky, if you're listening, he thinks, and moves-like-that through the rubble, blade in hand.

It works! 

...well, kind of. His sword is bathed in holy fire, but just a little bit of it, and it does hurt and surprise the creature when he phases through the rubble, but just a little bit. Enough to give it some pause and look at the smoking cut on its hand, not though that it can't immediately try to retaliate.

It has claws, even though it didn't a moment ago, and it moves fast, though not blindingly so. It swipes.

It can fucking try!

...oh, Mother, it can really fucking try. The Hammer-Strikes-Smoke Mantra works so much better when you can be the member of the equation who is Smoke. He takes a set of vicious ethereal claws across his chest, and... oh, those are bones. That's a significant quantity of his ribcage. He slams healing energy through himself and presses on.

Is he sure he wants to do that? The creature is definitely capable of dishing more hurt than it's taking; being ethereal in nature, it doesn't work so much in a "has a body that can be damage in ways that impair it" way as in a "probably will die if sufficiently damaged but until then it'll just keep going" way.

What a fucking coincidence. So does he.

If that's how he wants to die, the spirit is ?happy? to oblige him. It's completely silent, creepily so, and it's relentless in its attacks. It also deals more damage per hit and has more hit points than he does.

He heals, and strikes.

Strikes again, and heals.

Slashes furiously, without much technique, but with the burning resolve of a man who will not die today. He should have died a thousand times. He won't. He cannot die.

(He feels cold. That well of healing, how deep is it? It's never been tested like this. He's been hurt before, terribly, but not over and over and over and over -)

There's a loud snap sound, and a woman in a monk's gi appears next to him. 

There's another loud snap sound, and now both of them are in the little safe hole behind the rubble.

And the last sight he sees just before that happens is a man in sleeveless leathers with a shawl covering the lower half of his face, bearing two daggers as long as his forearms, stepping out of shadows not dark enough to have plausibly concealed him, pressing a flurry of attacks against the spirit.

zuh?

"Hello," he says inanely.

The monk scowls at him then snap snap gets the rogue in with them.

"Hello!" echoes the rogue. "We are here to rescue you."

"Thanks. Usually I do that. But, um."

Vague hand-flicking gesture which sends blood spattering against a nearby rock.

"Yeah, that looked tough."

"This is a waste of time. That thing's beyond us, the bounty only said to investigate, and if this person really wants to take it down he should've just died and come back with a stronger party next time," she says, as if Arik weren't right there.

"...I couldn't get out. And... dying... would not help???"

She glares at him.

"Sorry, we've been terribly impolite, my name is Taharqi and my friend here is Annika. Why do you think it wouldn't help? Do you not have a resurrection point?" He'd suspected as much, from the way the man had been fighting, but this seems like direct confirmation.

(There's a thud as the spirit hits the rubble particularly hard.)

"Arik. I do not and have never come back from the dead. ...I guess probably my heart's stopped a few times."

"Me neither! But I guess this might be my first time, if we have to actually fight past that thing to leave."

"Seriously."

"Oh? Were you planning to leave this poor misguided soul behind to die without a resurrection point?"

Why does he ask questions he knows the answer for. It's probably to make fun of her. ...it might be to make her have to admit it out loud. Well, she's not giving him the satisfaction.

"Thought so!" To Arik: "So, what can you do, Arik?"

...and Annika will grab some red potions from her pouch to offer Arik. She guesses.

Potions! ...oh that's extremely nice.

"I have this sword," Arik says, holding it up to the light. "It doesn't exist," he says, holding nothing in particular. "Very handy when you need to cut your foe to the quick but something's in the way, like armor; it's real for the flesh, but not the steel. Similarly I have armor that doesn't exist and I can have a shield that doesn't exist, but I'm not as good with them. And I can do a handful of other tricks like that, passing through barriers or existing in such a way that I can stand on the ceiling. And... I'm blessed, I guess, by the Skyfather and Earthmother. She lets me heal myself, He guides my blade against the unclean beasts of shadow."

He blinks. "I don't know why I phrased that like that."

This person is bizarre but since he seems to have spells (which she maybe should've guessed, given how he's equipped, or not equipped), she will also offer him some blue potions.

"Beats me! Do you think these potions would be enough for us to make a run for it, if you can go through walls?"

Blue potions! Oh that's so much better. He shudders all over.

"I can't go through much wall. Maybe a few feet at a time. If you've got a map, I'd be willing to try for an escape route, but I think that thing messed with my head so I lost my way out."

"I know the way out. I'm more wondering if the two of you can outrun it, it was a lot faster than I'd expected just now."

(Thud. Crash.)

Well Annika could Snap away, probably, but that does leave this guy behind.

Also, they're on a time limit here.

"I outran it before! Outran it into a hole in the wall, admittedly, but I did."

"Sounds like a plan. I'll try to distract it long enough to give the two of you a headstart, Annika can lead you out?"

"Mm."

"That's a 'yes, sir, that sounds like an astoundingly good plan, thank you for your brilliant insights and peerless leadership' in Annika's mothertongue."

"I heard fine, you domineering prick. Regional dialect?"

"It might be! And you managed to get a smile out of her in under an hour, you're only the second person I've met who could do that and I was not the first."

"I think you were probably trying too hard. Annika, I'm ready to run."

She nods, looks at Taharqi—

"Ready here, too."

Snap snap Taharqi is gone then snap Annika and Arik are out and she's started to sprint away.

Arik can sprint. Sprinting is a thing he can do.

Annika summons a large floating ball of blue flame that orbits around her while she runs. Its light doesn't reach very far but it does the same job as Arik's light of revealing unseen foes. Plus, whenever it touches one such foe it apparently does substantial damage to it.

She doesn't stop to fight anything, though, and just runs.

"Hello! Fancy seeing you here," says Taharqi, emerging from nowhere and easily keeping up with the other two. "You know, that thing might in fact follow us out. That'd be a problem."

Crash.

"...I was holding my own, for a bit. I think I'd do better if I didn't have to split focus and attack as well. Do you two think you could take it down, if it focuses on ripping me open?"

"How much hurt can you take? Annika can take a lot of it."

"Mm."

"Am I being a domineering prick again?"

"...I can do it. Tank it."

"I can take a lot of hurt. Especially focusing on shielding myself, especially if I have one of those potions. And you saw how much damage my blade was doing. I think this is going to work better if you two focus on the offense - the faster we destroy it, the less it can hurt us."

"Sounds like a plan! But let's worry about it if it actually follows us out, no need to borrow trouble unnecessarily. ...is that too much optimism? It might be."

"Everyone loves an optimist, except the gods."

The spirit continues to follow them, though the only noises it makes are when it crashes into things; even its footsteps are eerily quiet, and it doesn't have a mouth to make any other sounds. But they can outrun it, and the crashes become more distant, while the feeling of its hypnotic light gets weaker. By the time they're by the cave entrance, it seems like they've lost it.

Taharqi opens his mouth, then closes it. "I am not going to say what I was going to say because it would just be tempting fate."

Annika peers at the narrow entrance. "...how did it leave. Before. It cannot fit through this space."

"To get the corpses? It could have sent those other little spirits, maybe."

"No, not that. Our bounty was to investigate something harassing travellers outside, and Annika followed a spiritual trail here. What's this about corpses?"

"The villagers nearby were losing bodies from their graveyard. I followed a literal trail of grave dirt."

"Alright. So either that spirit was not the cause of the travellers' troubles—"

"It was."

"—or it must have some other way of leaving the ruins."

"Does it seem to anyone else," Arik wonders slowly, "like this is suspicious. That lantern that it sucks you in with, like a fishing rod... the corpses, dragged in as bait for heroes... this trickster-trapper spirit, which has to navigate these ruins all the time, crashing into every wall it can, so you can hear that it's right behind you. And so you think you know when it isn't."

It's so... cold...

"MOVE!" he cries, jumping to one side—

—at the same time as Annika Snaps herself and Arik away in a different direction—

—at the same time as a veritable crater appears right where they had been standing, followed by the creature itself becoming visible as it's touched by the revealing effect of Annika's and Arik's flames. 

It's also half again as tall as it'd been and has four arms now, and its eyes glow with the same terrible

(beautiful) 

light that had been in the lantern it'd been carrying before.

Ah.

Fuck.

Arik flings himself forward and drives his blessed blade into its featureless crotch to get its attention, while calling up his shield on his other arm. He's on defense, but he still needs to piss it off enough that it focuses on him.

The other two hang back to facilitate this process. While Arik angers the creature, Annika closes her eyes and starts to... meditate?

The spirit may be smart enough to try to lure them into traps but it's not smart enough to notice that it'd probably better ignore Arik and focus on the other opponents. To be fair to it, it hasn't actually seen what they can do. 

To be even fairer to it, new floating flames start appearing around it one by one to harass them anyway, and looking directly at any of them has the same effect as looking at the lantern did.

Alright Taharqi supposes his job will be keeping those off the backs of the other two, then?

Sounds good! Arik will be busy fighting this thing with his eyes locked on its torso like his life depends on it. Which it largely does!

He is getting significantly less mauled, this time around. The shield helps a lot, and so does not needing to capitalize on every opening. He can wait it out.

(That doesn't mean he isn't getting mauled.)

One. Two.

Small spheres of spiritual energy emerge from her body one by one and begin to circle her, even more slowly than her Ruwach.

Three. Four.

It's not a slow process, but from within the heightened awareness of a battle in progress it feels like an eternity. 

Five. 

Once the fifth sphere appears, she opens her eyes and there's a boom of air expanding outwards from her, and at the same time a layer of red energy envelops her whole body. She looks at the spirit and then—

snap

—she starts pummelling it. Punches and open palm hits, enchanted with Holy magic, placed with superhuman precision and backed with preternatural force.

The creature is noticeably surprised by the sudden onslaught, and though Annika's hits don't cut the same way Arik's sword does they still seem to be doing a fair amount of damage. It's starting to notice that maybe Arik isn't actually the biggest threat here so maybe it should focus on her instead—well, it has four arms, so it could divide its attention—

How about it gets stabbed about it? What about that proposal.

Yeah it's having trouble actually going after her even though it's trying. It's very much not even that Arik's hits hurt that much as that they're physically getting in the way and messing with its momentum and causing pain, and trying to make him not be in the way means it can't get to her.

And it's not like she's going to just let it hit her, either. She's not nearly as fast as Taharqi but she can still Snap. She's also consuming her spiritual spheres as she goes, and as they go down her hits become less powerful and fast, so she has to step away again to renew them. Really, the only reason she can concentrate on that is because Arik is distracting the monster and Taharqi is dealing with the constant streams of smaller spirits.

This... this feels good. This might be what it's supposed to feel like. Blood in his mouth, lungs burning, bones jarred from ringing steel - and still fighting, not just for his own life but for theirs.

Annika is kind of surprised that this is actually working. She'd have assumed killing this thing would be at least rank 2, if "get information about it" was rank 1. Then again, this person seems to have some very heavy-duty self-healing and incredibly high pain tolerance, she's not sure she's seen anything like that outside the Church's own Crusaders, so he might be kind of carrying all of them. ...then again, he clearly couldn't have actually taken it down on his own.

That's called teamwork, Annika.

It's unclear what tips the balance for the spirit, but it is smart enough to eventually realise that it's not going to win this, and so it decides that it should, actually, retreat.

Has it considered, instead, being extremely stabbed.

It has! It has decided against it. It turns around and starts to run—

Snap.

No it does not.

Taharqi doesn't have cool sound effects when he appears out of nowhere—it would, in fact, rather defeat the point—but he does have the ability to do so and intercept the spirit. This means that the smaller flame spirits are not being dealt with, but if they can take the bigger one down they'll probably dissipate.

Annika can optimise for something else, now that Taharqi is doing the damage-dealing. A change in her stance, a change in her punches, and now they're destabilising the creature rather than directly inflicting damage. Messing with its momentum, targetting specific points of balance, compensating for everything it tries to do to leave.

It may be able to become silent and incorporeal but clearly it still has an Actual Shape, and even though it tries going smaller again that doesn't seem to help, so instead what it'll try to do is go big and claw Annika open from head to toe.

...maybe she should've been expecting this but she wasn't, actually.

"Shit." Okay now they really need to kill this thing.

Oh, fuck that. Grab Annika's wrist and heal - it's always harder when it's on somebody else - oh that's much harder, actually. But the glowing brownish void in the center of his vision doesn't matter, she's back in one piece. He lurches forward for more stabbing, forcing blood to move through deadened limbs to kill this fucking thing.

"—hold it still," Annika says, and starts meditating.

Whhyyyy did that sound like she is about to do something very ill-advised.

Well, he'll do his best. He's not as good as she is at this but he can buy her time.

Arik can do it too. He... doesn't have any specific tricks under his belt for this, but he has gumption, and blood slowly flowing back to his brain and extremities.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

Then she reabsorbs the spheres into herself, and static starts to crackle on her skin and her, her eyes glowing.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

"Out of my way."

...yeah, that seems like the thing to do.

It sure fucking does!

Her Snap skill is a modified Teleportation, in that it actually translocates the caster and passenger without going through the intervening space. What's happening here instead is sheer overwhelming speed, faster than anything Taharqi's done so far, faster than the speed of thought.

Annika is in the middle of a mid-sized crater, her fist buried in the stone, in the place where the spirit was just a moment ago.

The spirit and its summoned minions are quickly dissipating, and the feeling of overwhelming cold and the negative spiritual pressure are all going away with it, leaving the place feeling very...

...mundane.

And she collapses and starts screaming.

Arik grabs her shoulder and tries to heal her, ready to pass out and - ah. Nope. Not the kind of thing he can heal, apparently.

...but, actually, he's had a very big day, and he is in fact going to pass out anyway.

When he comes back to, he's in a bed, inside a dark room somewhere. He can see soft light coming through the gaps around a wooden door, as well as moonlight seeping around curtains made of cloth covering a window to his left.

DEATH CONSIDERED PREFERABLE TO CURRENT SENSATION IN HEAD

Even if his captors did not have the common human decency to cut his throat, they have rested him on his side and provided a bucket by his mattress. He vomits with the speed and enthusiasm of a seasoned alcoholic. It helps remarkably little.

He moans ghoulishly, wishing he were an Odinite so he could pray to one of their funny little men about this. He hears Thor is popular for this situation.

Taharqi hears the ghoulish sounds and, a few seconds later, opens the door only wide enough to slip in before closing it behind himself again. "Hey, buddy. How're you feeling?"

"Okay, dumb question," he agrees, speaking in a low murmur. "But on the bright side we killed the thing and survived! ...kind of survived! Annika asked me to kill her so we're waiting on that."

"What?!" Arik tries to sit upright. Then he makes a noise that isn't really even sound, just air whistling out of his body - and then he clenches his teeth and gets out of bed, hissing. "Where is she?"

"...back at the nearest Kafra headquarters, probably? Lie down, you're going to pull something."

"She - she - they can treat her, there? She didn't... okay?"

"...I think there may be a bigger disconnect here than I thought."

Arik collapses back onto the bed. "She... you said. Asked you to kill her. Thought she was... worse than dead."

He still kind of feels like there must be some disconnect, but. "I'm... not sure, exactly, how she was feeling? She was just screaming very much and unable to offer any helpful suggestions and the only suggestion I gave that she seemed to accept was killing her, so I did, and the hopeful expectation is that Kafra will be able to help her be in better shape faster than if she just waited it out."

"Killed... help..."

He scowls at himself and clenches his hands together.

"People... die. You... don't?"

...ah. Okay.

This guy has in fact lived under a rock his whole life.

That'd make some sense of some things.

He pokes his tongue out then lifts it up to point at a little piece of metal pierced into its underside. "This," he says, tongue back where it should be, "has an enchantment that, when it detects that my heart has stopped, casts a stasis spell on me and teleports me to the nearest Kafra Corps headquarters. Once there, if I actually died someone is immediately called to resurrect me before my soul is unreachable. Then, I stay in stasis until someone can get to me, figure out what was wrong with me, fix it, and pull me out of stasis. It's one-use only, and if I pay more when I buy one I get bumped up the priority queue. Annika is going to need to buy a new one there, but on the bright side probably the reward for what we just did will be a lot more than enough to cover it."

"Oh."

Arik leaves it at that, for a moment.

"I'd heard stories," he says, when his head feels stationary again. "But... you hear stories. Thought it was... more on the Beowulf side. You know?"

"Your reaction is, I will be honest with you, making me wonder what rock you have lived under. And, ah, I don't want to pry, you don't need to tell me if you don't want to, we've just met. But. People will be curious."

Arik laughs, then very visibly regrets it.

"More of an ice-hut than a rock. There was a witch involved. Also, a campaign of deliberate misinformation. By the witch. Still... sorting that out."

"...that sounds rough, buddy. Should I get you an adventuring 101 book, is there even such a book, actually did the witch teach you how to read—wait. You're fucking with me."

"No, I was very much raised to adolescence by a woman with powerful dark magic and a really concerning personal relationship to the goddess Hel. She did teach me to read, though. And fight."

"And she also gave you the... necklace and bangles" and literally nothing else "that presumably were pulling most of the weight of keeping you alive there?"

"No, uh - I went down the mountain for festivals sometimes, and there was an old man in the village, Father Nikos, and I wasn't supposed to talk to him, so eventually I talked to him, and he told me that she was... how'd he put it, it wasn't wicked but it was something kind of odd and out of place like that? And he gave me the necklace and a little bell, and told me to sleep with the bell in my hand. And I did, and a few weeks later it woke me up while she was sneaking into my room with a dagger. And we fought. But she wasn't expecting me to be any kind of a real fight, and she distracted herself ranting, and I got in close and gutted her."

He fingers the necklace as he speaks. It's an unassuming little silver pendant with an embossed snowflake, and a tiny bead of a sapphire at the center.

"The bangles I just kind of picked up. Not all of them are even magic."

See, Taharqi would usually reckon he's really, really good at catching lies, and Arik really doesn't look like he's lying.

"...you know, I have a friend that I'd like to introduce you to, I bet he'd have a much easier time figuring all of that out than I would. If nothing else I think he'd be delighted to walk you through the basics of adventuring, and I am feeling out of my depth here."

"Is he hot?"

"Oh, incredibly. He's also a fan of being naked, men, and naked men, so something tells me you'll get along famously."

"Fantastic. Lead the way."

Arik sits up again. He takes it slower, this time, and his head has been hurting less and less through the whole conversation anyway; he makes it to his feet only wobbling a bit.

"Did you happen to rescue my pecopeco, by the by? If not we may have to stop by the entrance of that cave again, or he'll chew himself loose and wreak absolute havoc."

"Yeah, he's tied outside. But I shouldn't, actually, lead the way right now, because I should still wait for Annika to be back alive and also I didn't just spend several hours passed out and will need some sleep myself. ...also do you have any money." And if so, where do you store it, he doesn't ask. "I'll be happy to cover your teleportation to Geffen to meet my friend and I'll share your share of the bounty with you but you might want to think about that."

"-right, you're just visiting... ugh. I guess it's a situation where teleporting makes sense. How much does it cost?"

"Prontera to Geffen would be... less than a thousand zeny, I think? Six hundredish? And when Annika's here she can teleport us to Prontera. Kind of surprised in hindsight that you know about teleportation but not about resurrection points."

"It isn't as if adventurers were dying in front of me all the time! Anybody can teleport! Anyway, I've got that much, but if I needed to take a dozen trips like it I'd want to find somewhere to sell a ring."

"Oh you'll almost certainly get about fifty to a hundred thousand as your share for that bounty, for what that's worth."

"What am I supposed to do with it???"

"Typically adventurers will use that kind of money for teleportation, healing consumables, and to feed the insatiable maw of the gear and enchantment market."

"Those blue potions were convenient," Arik admits. "And... it would probably make sense to get more equipment. I just - it feels ridiculous to spend that much on it! If I gave a hundred thousand zeny to one of the people in this village, they wouldn't have to work for a year!"

He probably shouldn't bring up the six hundred million zeny earrings he saw that one time even though Arik's reaction would be very funny. "That necklace of yours is probably somewhere between the tens and hundreds of millions depending on exactly how it's managed to keep you alive this long. How many lives have you saved, do you think, that you couldn't have without it?"

"...oh."

He thinks about this.

"I don't think you're wrong. But it feels like... what I would say, if I were going to justify spending millions of zeny on shiny swords instead of on the people around me. And I don't know if I like it being true."

"My friend will probably also have a better understanding of stuff like that. Market forces and the like. But that's the gist of it, if I understand it well enough, that adventurers only pay that much because it's worth that much. Or, well, I guess not all adventurers are trying to save a bunch of people as a, ah, an objective itself. But something along those lines."

"I need to think about it. ...maybe over some food, I think it'd ground me. The locals have these really nice fried mutton-and-chickpea things, do you want one if I get myself some?"

"Nah, you go ahead, I'm going to catch some sleep."

"Alright. Rest like death, and wake to life." 

"...is that a thing the evil witch used to say? It's badass, if a little creepy."

"I've always thought so. The Cult of Hel isn't well-stocked with lullabies, but Beuriman was nothing if not creative."

"You know, Hel isn't really meant to be the patron goddess of evil witches, in standard Odinian and Freyjan mythology."

"Oh? I never actually got very much of a primer, I was born Deic and for some reason she raised me that way."

"Deic... hang on, I know that one, is that the religion of the natives of the Arunafeltz States?" A.k.a. the country they're in right now?

"Yeah. S'been interesting being around people who, uh, understand the religion. Mostly much better than I do. I stop in at the temples sometimes. -the main difference between us and the Odinites is that we've got the Father and the Mother and a couple others, but we don't give them... character traits? There's none of this 'Odin's beard!' or 'Freyja's saggy tits!' or stories about the Shadow fucking a horse. All seems a bit twee."

...he cracks up. "You know, when you put it like that, it does sound a bit absurd."

"Only a bit! But, yes, what I know about Hel is 'the girl Shadow, the one who's about people dying unpleasantly'."

"I suppose that's a way to put it," he says, shaking his head with a small smile. "Anyway, I'll leave you to it, I'm running on fumes right now and should hit the hay."

"Yes, hit your hay. I'm off to achieve falafel."

It's a few hours later, after everyone except for Arik is asleep, that there's the characteristic sound of a teleport outside and Annika's blue silhouette blinks into existence for a moment before the monk herself replaces it. She freezes for a fraction of a second to orient, then makes her way towards the building Arik and Taharqi are in.

Well, Arik's actually no longer in the building but running out the door with the intention of giving her a very firm hug.

The close proximity triggers her fight instincts but she notices it's him and—freezes.

"What are you doing," she asks, after a couple of seconds of it.

"Hugging," he says. "I can stop but I would prefer not to."

...okay?

She'll. Let that happen. She supposes.

Eventually Arik manages to let go. (There's a few false starts first.)

"Taharqi is sleeping," he says. "Sorry for... getting you killed."

She blinks slowly. "I asked to be killed. You didn't do anything."

"If I hadn't been there you would have left," he says. "And told your Kafra people about the spirit. And they'd have sent someone to kill it who wouldn't have had to... do whatever you did. That was worse than dying."

O...kay? She really does not know how to reassure people and doesn't actually quite understand why he seems to need reassurance. "I paid to be resurrected quickly. The only reason I took this long to come back was because I was collecting our rewards. Dying wasn't that bad."

"...that's very strange to me but I'm not going to contradict you."

He steps back. "Anyway. I'm glad it went better than I thought."

Right. Sure.

She reaches into one of the pouches attached to the inside of her gi to grab a small bag of money that is nevertheless a lot heavier than it should plausibly be able to be, and offers it to him. "Your cut. 83,334 zeny."

"Gods, that's so much money."

He holds it up to a golden bangle on his wrist, then hands it back. It now weighs as much as a small empty bag.

She accepts it and puts it away. "You should buy a resurrection point. The most basic one costs six thousand zeny and is available for purchase at the cheapest subscription tier."

"I am absolutely going to do that. I didn't know they were a real thing. Taharqi has been explaining various things to me, like what a resurrection point is."

She blinks again, a few times. He didn't know...? That explains some things. And raises other questions. 

...other questions she really doesn't give a damn about. "Is Taharqi asleep?"

"Yes. You should go in and wake him up, he'll be happier to see you than he will be mad about the disruption to his sleep."

"...why."

"He likes you, and he was worried that killing you didn't fix whatever happened, and he'll sleep better knowing you're okay."

You know what, that kind of stuff does sound like the crazy rogue. "I'm fine." But, alright, sure, she'll go wake him up, she guesses.

(There is a small plate of falafel by his bedside.)

...she isn't sure how to do this. Does she... poke him?

His lips curl into a mostly involuntary smile. "Annika..." he mumbles, pretending to be talking in his sleep. "Annika... don't go..."

...he's not fooling her. "I'm fine," she repeats, grabbing the bag of zeny with his share of the reward and tossing it to him.

It hits his chest and he oofs with the sudden concentrated weight then starts coughing. "That was uncalled for," he croaks.

"That person said you'd sleep better if you knew. So now you know. 83,333 zeny, by the way."

"That explains why it's so heavy." He pulls it off his chest and drops it next to the bed before sitting up. 

Then he notices the falafel. "Aww, he's very sweet."

Yeah, sure. "Are you going to sleep longer?"

"After being so rudely awakened I think I'll have trouble going back to sleep."

"So this was worse than useless."

"Would it make you happier if I did sleep longer?"

"Do whatever you want."

"Well, I suppose I could sleep some more; we'll need to be around at least until the morning to thank our hosts for their hospitality anyway."

"Fine. Good night."

"Good night, Annika."

That smile that she hates again. Fuck this guy. She's out.

Arik is grinning like an idiot.

Oh another smile that she hates. They're multiplying now. "What."

"You're both very cute. Sorry, that house isn't very soundproof."

She is a monk of Odin, she is not cute. "Whatever you say." ...but being resurrected means she's not at all sleepy or tired so she's going to need to find something to do with herself until morning.

"Do you want to spar?"

...that might be a useful way to spend the time, actually. "What conditions?"

"...I should clarify that I have never sparred with anyone other than my deceased foster mother. Who wanted to kill me. Probably you should be the one to propose conditions."

She nods. "To yield, immobilisation, or unconsciousness, then. Property damage or lethality forfeits, indifferent to blood or broken bones, nothing that costs over fifteen percent of your mana at once." That last part completely rules out the attack she did to kill the spirit, which consumes all of it.

"Oh! Those are very sensible rules. I agree."

Arik shifts his stance. His eyes are strangely unfocused. His skin is still bare, but the light glints off something an inch above it. He's holding his sword, which is to say there is the intimation of a sharp edge somewhere in his vicinity. "On three?"

"Yes." She's summoning her spirit spheres already.

"One. Two. Three."

And he lunges.

Annika's fight style is being both an unstoppable force and an immovable object. When she's expecting an attack, even one that is in theory meant to cut, she can often tank it. So she does not move an inch and instead prepares to intercept his blade with her bare hands (not that she's telegraphing it, of course).

She may have trouble with that, actually. See, the thing about blocking something is that it has to be a thing, and generally, it should be a thing that exists. His sword isn't and doesn't. Her hands close on air, and her shoulder gets a fun new piercing, and Arik dances away.

Annika Snaps out of the way once she notices he's actually managed to cut her but otherwise does not flinch at the pain. Flinching at the pain would not lead to victory, and she is the master of her own body.

...what the fuck just happened.

(Arik might observe that she is passively regenerating, slowly, just by standing there.)

She doesn't know how he did that. She vaguely remembers him saying something about his sword not being real? Cutting flesh but not armour? She's not wearing armour, and she relies rather a lot on her own natural resilience. If that's not going to work, she is going to need something else.

She'll change tacks. And for the first move of her new tack, she Snaps right up and close to him with one palm forward pressing directly against his chest with overwhelming force.

He goes flying and lands in a plume of sand and dust!

Wow that's a lot of sand isn't it. Kind of hard to see.

Well, she didn't use her eyes to find that spirit, did she, and she is nothing if not a fast learner. Sounds, smells, the feeling of the movement of air against her skin (she is not any good with that one, but the way you get good is by practising it so she's doing that), and the movements of the spiritual currents around her (also not amazingly good at that, with targets that aren't themselves spirits, but same), those are all available to her as sources of information about her quarry.

And she is fully immersed in her body. She's not moving, she's barely breathing, but she's holding herself lightly, ready to move at the softest touch. Brute resistance won't work, but she can still dodge.

...some of those sensory modalities are being more cooperative than others. Her ears aren't picking up any of the sand-crunching footsteps, and the air is moving exactly as if there were no one else in this sand cloud except her. But there is a spiritual presence. In fact, it's quite bright, if flickery - a spirit overflowing, imperfectly contained by flesh and skin. She can even sense his sword separately from him!

It's coming for the back of her leg.

She can move it in the same direction and at the same speed as it's coming, then, just as it touches her, so that it looks like it's going to connect until the very last moment, and twist her whole body just so, rotating around her other heel as a pivot point to try to land a punch on Arik from above, and four more immediately after if that one connects.

Oh, it connects. He hits the ground so hard it actually settles a good deal of the dust cloud, by virtue of some kind of complicated downward momentum equation. He's also laughing like a maniac. Some of it's more like coughing. The dust, you know.

Is that so. Then she's absolutely going to press the advantage, Raging Quadruple Blow into Raging Thrust into Chain Crush Combo, consuming a Spirit Sphere to make herself momentarily faster and stronger—

(He is going to need to do something because she can and will in fact just keep going until he's down otherwise.)

Eventually he slaps the ground and laughs "Mother, mother! You win!"

She stops mid-blow as soon as he slaps the ground (before she finishes her Chain Crush Combo) and steps back, light on the balls of her feet. Then she steps back forward and offers him a hand up.

He takes the hand and clambers to his feet. He's moving in a way that indicates at least one broken bone, but probably one of the fiddly little ones nobody cares about.

"Knew you were good, but damn, you're good."

...she smiles. "What did you do?" she asks, finally bothering to look at her shoulder to check how bad that was.

No worse than a decently enchanted ordinary sword that happened to ignore the stopping power of solid bone. Fortunately, this means it didn't fuck up her bones or ligaments, because they're untouched.

"Mm. First of all, I'd like to disclaim that nothing I'm about to say is true, because truth and falsehood are lies humans tell about a fundamentally nonsensical illusion called 'reality'. But the convenient thing about that is that you don't actually have to tell the same lies as anyone else. Of course, there's more of them, so they're more convincing. But if you're good enough at lying, you can convince the world that up is down. And I can literally do that."

"You said words but they didn't mean anything," she says, as she sits down cross-legged and starts meditating on regenerating faster.

"I did warn you. I don't think it can actually be explained in a way that makes sense to anyone who isn't temperamentally suited to doing it, anyway."

He gets tired of the feeling of bone scraping bone, and heals himself.

...sure.

Well, she's found a counter to him. And... "What would you do next time, to win against me?"

"Mm. How'd you see me through the dust?"

"Your spiritual signature. And your sword's. They were... almost as bright as the spirit's, from yesterday. Different. Opposite. But bright."

"Huh. That doesn't sound like something I want to fix, let alone something I can, so probably harrying you from cover isn't the game. ...I wasn't that badly hurt by the end, but it was hard to concentrate with you hitting me like that. Which I imagine was the idea. Still, I could've probably focused enough to get a blade back in my hand and stabbed you in the gut."

"Unless you can move much faster than you've demonstrated, I would have dodged it. ...or I could have dodged it. What would you do next?"

"An enemy who's dodging is an enemy who isn't beating me senseless. I'd have probably invoked the Hammer-Strikes-Smoke Mantra... dunno how well that'd work on you, but it's like the sword's bit backwards. Not being a thing-that-can-be-struck. Maintaining it isn't easy, I don't usually bother unless something seems like it stands a chance of really fucking me up."

"And how does that make you win?"

"Interesting question. I suppose it doesn't, but it puts me in a better position, doesn't it?"

She shakes her head. "Yes. But. Choices are only good if you can use them to win. It didn't..." Words. How do those work. Come on, Annika, you can do this, believe in yourself. "It didn't look like you were taking actions that would cause you to win. Just actions that would make winning easier. There is a difference." Although putting it this way feels like she's placing the cart ahead of the peco peco. How would Fist Keera put it? She will try to come up with something better.

"I think you might be right," he muses. "I don't do enough winning. I succeed, but it's because I'm very bad at losing. And... what was it that Beuriman liked to say, the undefeated swordsman must be exceptionally poor."

She nods along with that. It's not exactly something any of the Fists have said but it rhymes with their philosophy. "Every movement, in service of your goal. Every cut, in service of your goal. Every parry, in service of your goal. Every step, every breath, every choice, every thought, in service of your goal. That is the way of the monk. ...you're not a monk, but..." If she didn't think that was a good philosophy she wouldn't have become a monk, now, would she? And she understands that not everyone should be a monk but she does think that everyone should have that philosophy.

Taharqi has that philosophy, for all that he's a nightmare to spar with and acts all twisty and she can't see how he chooses what to do; he still does win, too reliably for it to be just luck.

"...maybe I should find a teacher. Not for the True Art, I don't think there are teachers for that, but - for winning."

"'The True Art'. Is that how you call the thing where you don't exist?"

"I call it a lot of things. I don't think it has a name, strictly speaking, but - the True Art is lying to the very bones of Ymir."

That has a nice ring to it, she has to admit.

She hops to her feet and starts summoning her Spirit Spheres again. "Again, now trying to win."

Taharqi wakes up reasonably early the next morning. He thanks their hosts, who thank him right back, profusely, for dealing with the thing that was stealing their dead. He feels bad taking credit for that since that was not at all mentioned by the bounty they'd been chasing but Arik did do it for that reason so he deserves those thanks.

And then they're ready to go. "So, Annika is probably going back to the Abbey for more training, but we should get you set up with a Kafra subscription and resurrection point, and then maybe I can drop you off at Geffen and introduce you to my friend? I'm probably gonna spend a while there, too, I haven't seen him in months."

Arik is happy to let Taharqi take credit for dealing with the dead-stealing, because if Taharqi hadn't been there it wouldn't have been dealt with! It was a team effort. (However, he maintains that the granny who makes the falafel likes him better.)

"That all sounds great." Arik gives a sweet root vegetable to Tommy the pecopeco, because Tommy was a very good boy and did not bite off even one of Taharqi's fingers for slinging Arik over his back like a sack of grain and leading him back to town. Not for lack of trying, but still.

(Taharqi was glad to find out that he hadn't been singled out for Tommy's murderous hatred. He had been feeling very hurt, last night, by how much Tommy seemed to want his death.)

Annika grabs a blue gemstone from an inner pocket in her gi and crushes it in her hand, causing a pillar of blue light to appear in front of her.

Taharqi steps into it and disappears in a flash of blue light.

"Do I also..."

"Yes."

Hop skip and a jump into the pretty blue light, Tommy following behind.

It's... pretty anticlimactic, all in all. His vision flashes blue, and he finds himself elsewhere. It doesn't really feel like anything.

He's in a clean lobby that could belong in an upscale inn in some big city. There is a counter manned by five people with one hallway to either side of it leading into parts unknown. There is a sort of a lounge area with chairs and potted plants and some artwork. There is a door behind him leading outside.

The architecture and art are recognisably Feltzeen—polished marble, metal-and-glass hanging lights, a huge section of the floor is transparent glass with limpid water flowing lazily visible underneath—but it's approximately maximally sterile and inoffensive within those constraints.

The sound of a teleport announces Annika's arrival behind him, and after she catches Taharqi's and Arik's eyes and nods at them she disappears into more blue light.

"Alright! Let me introduce you to some of the marvels of modern adventuring."

Arik follows dutifully, looking around. "Is this some kind of temple?"

"No, this is the lobby of the Kafra Corps. They provide a bunch of services for money, and aren't affiliated with any governments or churches. Relevantly, the resurrection point, but also storage and teleportation and a few other things." He gets in the non-urgent queue to speak with someone behind the counter.

"...kind of a money-temple, I guess. It's so shiny."

"Ha. Yes, I suppose you would not go far wrong imagining these people worship money."

"Reminds me of Lighthalzen," he grumbles.

"...really? I suppose the marble and the water are reminiscent."

"The marble, the water - we're an oasis in the desert, la - and they've waxed that marble floor. And they polish the wax. That's Lighthalzen."

"The ostentatiousness for no reason other than itself? I can see that." He hopes Arik has never been to the Rekenber Corporation HQ because he might blow a gasket there.

"Not understanding that there could be a reason for something to be beautiful. If you have a beautiful sword, it should be because it does its job and you take care of it. If you have a beautiful temple, it should be because you love your god and the beauty reminds you of that. You shouldn't have a beautiful bank. You can have a nice bank, because people have to look at it. But you shouldn't love it, and it shouldn't be beautiful. ...and you shouldn't polish a marble floor, anyway, not when people are tromping their greaves over it, it'll scuff. Leave the stone to weather."

"Next, please!"

"That'll be us," he says, thankful for not having to come up with something to say in response to that. "My friend here would like a resurrection point. He doesn't have a prior registration with you guys or Eden Group or Kuru Corps."

"Of course." They grab a piece of paper and offer it to Arik with a ballpoint pen. "Please fill out as much of this as you are comfortable with. The only mandatory field is your name, but for best access to your services we should collect your magical signature for future authentication."

"Oh, thank you."

He sets about the form. His name is Arik Bergson. How much of the rest does he even know?

Date of birth, location of birth, names of parents, Eden registration, various identification documents from various countries, membership to any of a number of Guilds and other organisations, current address...

"I would be comfortable giving you the rest of this information if I had any of it," he says, handing over the paper with his name on it and nothing else.

"Naturally. Am I authorised to collect your magical signature?"

"...what are you actually going to do with it?"

"Use it as your universal identification protocol for you to access any services you may hire from us; without it, and with so little other information, it will be quite difficult to verify that you are who you say you are in the future, and so the number of services we will be able to offer you will be limited."

"Mm. I'm fine with that, then."

They grab a little marble square with a small spike in the center. "Please press a finger against this hard enough to draw blood. It will not actually draw any blood or hurt you at all, it will merely capture a snapshot of the stressed patterns of your signature. If you have any kinds of magical protection, especially mental or spiritual, please disable them or add an exception to them for this. It still works even if you don't do that, but most shields will make it easier for others to fake being you."

"No, okay, I'm not doing that. Is there any other way to verify my identity, can I tell you my foster mother's dying words."

This person is completely unruffled, almost like they deal with weird idiosyncrasies from adventurers daily. They take the square back and say, "A secret question-answer pair can work, yes, as can a regular passcode, or many of those. You may write them down or speak them aloud, and you may cast any privacy spells you wish to ensure the information will not leak to eavesdroppers. We are also happy to provide you with a privacy spell or a shielded room for this purpose for an extra charge."

"I'll whisper in your ear, if you don't mind."

His foster mother's dying words were, apparently, If you loved me - if you ever loved me - no! No, you vultures - this was not glory! This was not honor! This was not -

"And then, you know, blood-choked death rattle. Not sure I can reproduce that bit on command."

They write it down, reread it, then say, "Could you repeat that for verification purposes?"

Yeah, he's not gonna forget it any time soon.

"Thank you very much, sir, your registration has been processed. Now, if you wish to purchase a subscription and a resurrection point, please head down that hallway and let me colleague at the next counter know, they will be able to present you with our available plans. Have a nice day!"

Off he trots.

"Good of them to have an alternative arrangement," he comments.

"I would guess you might have been the second weirdest person they've had to deal with this week."

"I'm not giving charming strangers my fucking blood, Taharqi. I have lived in this world too long."

"I wasn't going to try to convince you to, the kind of—man, I bet Vallynn would have some fancy words for this like 'institutional trust' or something—anyway, I would be suspicious in your metaphorical shoes, too."

"Quite! Which is why it's good they took an alternative."

The person at the next reception is equally bland and professional, and presents him with various options for subscriptions and plans. The most basic subscription tier is 150z a month, and it gives him access to a basic resurrection point for 10,000z, plus a few upgrade options for extra money like an ability to customise the conditions for triggering the enchantment to a limited extent.

The expected time for resurrection is between 6 and 72 hours after death, depending on how busy his nearest Kafra office is at the time, and he can pay extra to be bumped up the priority queue but that works in a "whoever paid the most amongst the people who are currently dead goes first" way. They have a spread of how much people tend to spend and expected delay per amount paid, if he'd like to make a more informed decision.

Arik would like to not die when he is killed. Further details are unnecessary. Minimum viable not dying, please.

Also, can they stable his extremely aggressive pecopeco.

Roger that! They can help him with both things. His mount is sent to a stable and then, what kind of gear piece would he like the enchantment to be placed on? Earring, necklace, armlet, bracelet, ring, anklet, various kinds of piercing, there's clothing items too but this person is guessing Arik does not want one of those, they can enchant something Arik already owns but that might interact badly with existing enchantments and costs extra...

"My companion has it in his tongue and that seems very cosmopolitan and exciting. D'you just poke it through?"

"Yes, that's certainly doable. Please go into the room to my left and someone will be with you shortly."

He can do that!

"Taharqi, will you hold my hand?"

He blinks. "Sure," he says, offering a hand.

Arik takes it. "When I had my ears pierced, a girl offered to hold my hand through it," he explains. "Because she thought I'd be scared of it hurting otherwise. I always thought that was cute, and since I've got you here I thought I might make it a tradition."

"I'm happy to hold—my brain jumped to an innuendo that would be a lot more crass than I want to be and I can't find one that isn't—I am happy to offer you support, how's that."

"I won't say no to crass, but probably not on the marble flooring."

"Didn't you say the floor needed some wearing out? We could wear it out."

"I think anything intense enough to strip the polish from the marble would get us kicked out. Also, unless you cum acid, I have no idea what could possibly do that."

"That seems like a lack of creativity on your part."

"Mr. Bergson? I have your enchantment ready," says a person emerging from a door.

Arik dutifully opens wide and sticks his tongue out.

And now he is pierced and healed for his trouble. "Thank you very much! Is there anything else Kafra can help you with today, sir?"

"Um."

He turns to Taharqi.

"We'll teleport to Geffen later but for other services, maybe open a storage account?" He looks at the Kafra person.

"That's certainly doable!" they say, turning back to Arik. "We have multiple tiers of storage service of increasing capacity and convenience. At the low end, you can rent a box and have a Kafra agent teleport it to you whenever you need it; at the high end you can have an entire room of storage including weapon racks, stasis chambers, cold storage, and many other amenities, plus the service of an employee to fetch anything for you so you don't have to do it yourself, plus an enchanted item that can teleport you directly to it and then back where you came from at will."

"I'll take the box, thanks. Five-foot cube."

"Certainly! I can register you very quickly for that. Do you have anything you wish to store at this time?"

Arik looks down at himself.

Arik looks back up.

"I'm alright."

"Of course! If that'll be all, then, I hope you have a wonderful day. My colleague in the main lobby will be able to teleport you to Geffen."

"Thanks for all your help."

Can the helpful representative's colleague in the main lobby teleport them to Geffen?

They indeed can! Costs this much.

Taharqi can pay for it.

Here's a portal, please step into it.

Hyup!

Hyah!

Geffen's moniker is "the City of Magic", and it's well-earned. The Mages' Guild is headquartered there, but that in itself is a consequence, not the cause, of its focus on magic. The kingdom of Geffenia, which regained its independence from the kingdom of Rune-Midgard within the last hundred years, was founded by elves, hundreds of years ago before the majority of them moved back to Alfheim and sealed the entrance—and one of the main things they've always been great at was magic. And now, with magic back in the world and humans once more capable of wielding it, Geffenia has become the world power it used to be.

The whole city is roughly hexagonal, and is oriented around the Wizard Tower. It's arranged in concentric terraced rings of roads and buildings, with rings closer to the tower in the center placed lower than those farther out, and there are six main radial roads leading from the outermost ring all the way to the Tower. That means that the Tower is even taller than it looks from the outside, and looks progressively more impressive and imposing the closer to it you get. Couple that with the fact that it is visible from a fair distance away from the city, easily five times taller than the next tallest building, looking impressively wizardly—even to eyes that can't see the torrents of magic coming from it and powering various wards and enchantments all over the city, including a ward that covers the city itself—and you get a very awe-inspiring sight, widely considered one of the greatest feats of architecture on the continent.

And as if that weren't enough, the city itself is very obviously magical. The streetlights, not currently lit up this early in the day, are floating lamps with mage lights inside them. The plaza the two of them find themselves at once they've gone through the portal has a fountain with a statue made up of hunks of stone connected to each other by glowing magical tendrils to form the rough silhouette of a wizard with their staff held out in front of them. And though the staff is not physically connected to anything else, that's where the water is spouting from.

"Okay, I can respect this," Arik judges. "It's still showing off, but magic is a much less annoying thing to show off than money."

"Personally I like it for the, you know, artistic merit itself. Not just the showing off, but it's—pretty in the same way a painting or a sculpture or a song are pretty, you know?"

"Oh, yes, it's lovely too. I just think... if something's ugly, that's the end of it, it's failed. If it's beautiful, I have more to judge."

"You know what, that makes sense, I respect that. Anyway, let's see if we can find Vallynn," he says, and starts leading the way down the road towards the Wizards' Tower.

Good place to start. "He's a wizard?"

"In training. We met at the Academy a few months ago, we were roommates. —do you know about the Academy?"

"Nope!"

"Alright I'll leave it to him to explain it but it's a place sponsored by Eden Group—big adventurer org—that trains novice adventurers in the basics and streamlines acceptance into one of the major Guilds out there."

"...Eden. Them I've heard of. ...you trust them?"

"Oh, yes. With a lot more than just my life. ...I'm from Morroc, I lived in the city proper, the only reason I'm not dead is that I was away from it when Surt destroyed it, and Eden is the main reason why that did not go a lot worse than it could have. They got Rune-Midgard and Morroc to actually mount a defense and guarding system."

"...that's good to know."

It takes a bit of walking for him to find what to say.

"Beuriman told me a lot of things," he settles on. "She was lying about a lot of them. But - some of them, they're true and nobody knows it. Anyone would tell me she was lying, and if I hadn't seen the proof I'd believe them. And she didn't have proof, about Eden. But no one would know if she was right."