The hike back to Morganville was largely uneventful. Dan spotted several monsters, but after eyeing him up, most wisely avoided him. Briefly, Dan pondered chasing them down, giving in to his almost instinctive desire to collect more mana. Deep down, he knew that those impulses came from the darker side of himself. There wasn’t anything to be gained from slaying something as weak as a blood bear. The monsters might have been a threat to him when he first came to Twilight, but now, unless there were large numbers, they didn’t pose that much of a risk.
Finally, the whiteish walls of the village in sight, Dan set down his pack and pulled out a water flask while he considered his options. At this point, he was probably more powerful than anyone in town. Of course, probably didn’t mean certainly, and after his run-in with Daeson, Dan wasn’t all that keen to pick a fight that he wasn’t sure of winning. Even if he was the strongest person around, that didn’t mean a whole lot if enough people ganged up on him. Given that he could see four guards by the gate, two on the ground, and two leaning on bows in a guard tower, Dan didn’t want to force the issue.
Worse, as Dan wracked his memory of entering the town from months ago, he recalled Nora always arranging entrance for him. He didn’t know if getting in or out of the town required a pass, a toll, or nothing at all. He couldn’t help but mentally kick himself. Yet another example of how she had led him to rely on her in an effort to keep him helpless. Even with her using magic on him, it was inexcusable that he had never bothered to question her dragging him into overly-dangerous dungeons and never letting him even look at a map or interact with any strangers. She hadn’t given him a moment of downtime, and every resident of Morganville that he interacted with was carefully selected and vetted by her. It was entirely possible that everyone he knew inside the town was working for Nora’s employers, and he was none the wiser the entire time.
Dan capped the water bottle and returned it to his hip. Picking up his pack, he slowly circumnavigated the town, looking for a way he could sneak in. He was doing his best to put his naive and dumb days behind him so there would be no cheerfully trying to walk in through the front. He sighed. That meant going over a wall fast enough that he didn’t get caught by one of the guards. Luckily, they weren’t very attentive, and they walked their circuits slowly, but by Dan’s count, their circuit only left him about five to seven minutes to get over the wall. It would be close, but with his magic, he would be able to do it.
He sneaked as close as he dared before hunkering down and pulling a blanket over the reflective metal of his armor and weapons. Just barely peeking over the edge of the blanket, he waited until the bored guard walked past and bolted towards the wall, praying that the man didn’t turn around. Dan activated the high performance mode of his strength rune at the same time as Gravitational Easing and jumped.
He hit the wall, his armor rune dulling the impact from the collision. He slammed the looted sword into the smooth stone wall, grimacing as the handle vibrated in his grip as if trying to buck him from the wall.
Frantically, he searched for a handhold with his right hand, only to find nothing but unmarked stone. Dan ‘s left hand slipped by a fraction. No matter how strong he was, his fingers only had so much surface area. There was no way they would be able to hold him indefinitely. In a panic, he drew Daeson’s sword with his right hand and ran some mana into it. The blade had a sharpness rune along with a couple others in a sequence that he didn’t recognize. Dan wasn’t entirely sure what the sword did, but he suspected that the runescripting would make it more useful in combat. The sword glowed purple and vibrated slightly in Dan’s hand. He jammed it into the stone wall and blinked in surprise when it sunk in halfway to the hilt.
Quickly, he carved out a generous handhold before clumsily sheathing the blade and pulling himself up a foot or so. He let go of the wall with his left hand and flexed his fingers in an effort to return feeling to them before drawing the sword with his left hand and repeating the performance. The blade sunk into the wall like it was made of clay. The stone still slowed the magical sword, but it was hardly a serious impediment to the humming weapon. With a grunt, he pulled himself up.
Slowly, he repeated the process, handhold by handhold, working his way up the wall. At one point he stopped, pulling himself as tight to the wall as possible when the guard’s footfalls signalled that one was marching by overhead. He held his breath, but the patrolling guard had other concerns.
After all, who expects a threat to be flush to the wall a mere ten feet beneath them? Frankly, the guard would have had to pause in his rounds and put his head directly over the edge to catch Dan. So long as he didn’t give the man any reason to do so, getting noticed was unlikely. Still, Dan breathed a sigh of relief when the guard finally passed him.
Dan pulled himself over the top of the battlements and looked both ways. The guard would be coming back shortly, but he had a moment. He let himself fall over the edge of the wall, jamming the magic sword into it with both hands to slow his descent before he hit the ground. He needed to move fast. The scar in the wall might not be noticed immediately, but it was only a matter of time before someone spotted it. Still, Dan didn’t imagine himself staying in Morganville for a minute more than he needed to.
He walked into the town’s streets and tried to blend in. It worked, to a certain extent. after almost a year away from the town, no one was looking for him. But people gave him a wide berth. It was like the monsters on his way back to the village, there was just something about higher-rank individuals that gave off a threatening aura. It didn’t matter terribly much to him; he wasn’t here to chitchat about the weather or a local sports team, he just needed to get to the teleportation array.
Finally, after wandering aimlessly for almost half an hour, Dan gave up on finding the array on his own. He stopped to purchase some fruit from a vendor and idly asked the old man for directions. The grandpa’s eyes flashed with fear, but he hesitantly pointed out the directions to Dan. After tipping him heavily, Dan was back on his way.
After another twenty minutes of walking, he found the array. Really, it shouldn’t have been that hard, given that the array itself was a giant set of runescripting around a towering quartz crystal that glowed faintly with yellow light in the center of a cobblestone plaza. Even from where he stood at the edge of the promenade, space mana poured off of the crystal in a palpable way. Unfortunately, the runes had a metal fence topped in spikes running around it and a guardpost with a toll booth erected at the only entrance. Unlike the guards at the walls, these men stared both at the crowd of citizens going about their day and the rune itself.
Realizing he wasn’t going to be able to slip past these guards, Dan fingered the hilt of his new sword while striding forward. Even if they were alert, Dan had survived a night without runic protection. A handful of mundane-classed humans weren’t going to slow him down from what he needed to do. Plus, a quick battle here would keep his skills sharp and give him a quick dose of–
A hand grabbed his forearm, interrupting his thoughts. Dan stopped, still concealed from the guards by a crowd of milling citizens, and glanced to his side. There stood Nora, her face white, staring at him with her mouth slightly agape as she held onto his arm. Dan could have easily pulled away from her even before he had enhanced himself; her grip was fragile and her arm shook. Instead, he turned to her.
“Nora,” he said smoothly, glancing her up and down and noticing that she was still armed with a dagger, bow, and leathers, much as she was when they first met. “It’s hardly a pleasant one, but I have to say it is quite the surprise to see you again.”
“How are you alive?” She asked, eyes wavering. “I saw your runes fail! I know what comes out after dark. I’ve seen it myself, when they came for my friends and family! How did you survive? How?”
“Luck, at first,” Dan shrugged her hand off of his arm and turned to face her. “I killed a stalker one-on-one, but it crippled me. Someone saved me and helped me transform myself. I’m not the same pushover today that I was when you first scoped me out as a mark. Even now, everything you’re saying is really about you. ‘How did I survive when your family didn’t.’ You aren’t even taking responsibility for what you did.”
“I didn’t do anything bad, Dan,” she pleaded, her voice quivering. “The Alliance of Free Cities needs to have information on mages of your caliber that wander through their territory. I had to lie to you to see if you were a threat to Morgan or the Alliance. You have to believe me, I never had a choice.”
“Never had a choice?” He questioned her, incredulously. “You could have just let me be when you saw me out on the moors. Hell, once you realized that I was ignorant of everything on Twilight and not a threat, you could have dropped things. I probably would have still worked with you while trying to rank up. I made it clear that I didn’t particularly care what I was doing so long as I was getting stronger. Instead, you messed with my mind and pushed me to the brink of destruction and now, months after you thought you killed me, you actually have the gall to play the damsel in distress?” He could feel the rage building within him as he barely kept his voice in check.
“It doesn’t work like that for someone like me, Dan,” she whispered sadly. “I can understand why you hate me. I’d hate me too, but I have my own reasons for why I need to get stronger. Morgan found me as a refugee and an orphan, and she took me in when no one else would. She gave me my class. Without Morgan, I don’t have the backing or support I’d need to be anything. I’d be a beggar or a whore until hunger or disease did me in.”
“I owe her everything Dan,” Nora was crying as she searched his face for pity. Finding none, she continued. “I can’t betray Morgan or her vision, Dan. I’m sorry about what I did to you, but I would do it again in a second for her. I can see your anger and feel the mana coming off of you. I know there’s no way that I could beat you in a fair fight right now, and I’m not sure that I want to. If you’re so angry at me that you want to kill me right here and now, I just ask that you make it quick.”
She closed her eyes, tears streaming down her cheeks and raised her head to Tanloff hanging in the sky above.
How dare she, Dan fumed. How fucking dare she. After everything she did to him when he trusted her, she pulled this stunt. She had almost killed him, almost enslaved him, and tried to mess with the framework of who he was as a person. All of this while claiming to be his friend. She didn’t deserve his sympathy. Like everything else, her sob story was probably a ploy. In her upturned face, he saw both his mother and his ex-girlfriend. He saw their passive aggression, their emotional manipulation, their emotional brinkmanship. He saw the way they would turn every minor mistake of his into an all-consuming ordeal and turn him into the villian of every story.
Mana flowed into Daeson’s sword, causing it to glow and vibrate in his hand. Around him, the crowd of civilians began screaming and running as he brought the blade back. Somewhere, the guards were screaming at him to drop his sword and charging him, but it didn’t matter. He would kill Nora for what she had done to him and finally vent the anger that had been building up inside of him for the better part of two decades. Once she was done, he would harvest the guards’ mana and be done with this treacherous planet.
Dan swung the blade, his arm a blur. Inside him, a traitorous voice whispered to him that she didn’t deserve her mana. It would be his here and now.
Dan’s eyes widened, and he cut the flow of mana to his sword. The blade was moving too fast to stop the blow entirely, but he rotated the blade at the last second. With a loud crack the flat of the blade impacted on the side of her head, and Nora dropped to the ground bonelessly, clearly concussed.
He swiveled back to the guards charging him. Without really thinking, he triggered Lightning Strokes into them, causing them to twitch and spasm as they fell to the ground. In the back of his mind, the voice screamed at him. To finish off Nora, to take the guards’ mana. To give in to his anger and become a butcher, consumed by the ecstasy of the moment.
Instead, he ran past the insensible guards towards the platform. Maybe the voice was right; maybe he should kill the guards so that they couldn’t stop him. Maybe he should kill Nora. She certainly would have done the same to him. Still, that decision was for him to make, not the ball of addiction, rage, and hunger that grew in his psyche like a cancer. If he ever returned to Twilight, he would make his decision at that time. Not now, when it wouldn’t truly be him making the decision.
He reached the array and placed his hand on the giant quartz crystal. Instantly, he recognized it as a battery, like the ones he had charged to get him to Twilight in the first place. Activating the System, he instructed it to feed Earth’s location into the runes.
For a second, nothing happened. He frowned, trying to activate System again.
Verifying heart rate.
Verifying surroundings.
<USER> has access to a teleportation array and is not under duress. Coordinates unlocked.
At the entrance to the plaza, a platoon of guards charged in. By their heavily-enchanted silver armor and their efficient and practiced movements, Dan could tell that they were a cut above the guards he had fought so far. Each one of them was at least a rank 3. On their own, they were not enough to kill him, but in numbers, they were a definite threat.
More elite guards poured in after the initial wave. Sweat prickled at the nape of his neck.
Then, the array sucked the mana from him, energy flowing into the battery as the magical artifact powered up.
He smiled and waved as the energy swelled around him, and the fabric of space itself seemed to reach down and pick him up. The world around him spun, then it went white. He couldn’t see anything, but he felt a tremendous sense of acceleration. Then, he was spat out of the air and landed on his hands and knees on good, old-fashioned cement.
The System chimed.
Welcome back to Earth <USER>
Wifi detected
Synchronizing
