(TPOR) Chapter 185: A Dollar For Everytime

The air was heavy and stale, which was odd.

It was like walking in a mist so thick you could feel it on your skin, yet to your nostrils it felt like there was too little air in the atmosphere.

James was what he liked to call an aspiring Olympian. But if he was being honest, he wasn’t even one at all. He’d applied for the test a year ago. Success would’ve meant joining the VHF training school to become a cadet. And only specific cadets would successfully become Olympians.

He had been hoping for a touch of success. It was the only path to greatness for an attribute mage like himself. The Olympian suit would’ve boosted him to greater heights. The rumors had it that the armor boosted its wearer by an entire rank. He would’ve gone from Beta category one to a Rukh in the armor.

Sadly, he had failed the test. Why? He didn’t have enough mana. His physical attributes were not of qualifying levels. In shameful summary, he didn’t meet any of the criteria to become a cadet.

So he had done what any unreasonable person with dreams of greatness and too much time on his hand would do. He’d joined the rebellion on one of their escapades out of the city.

For an aspiring Olympian, it wasn’t the right thing to do. But it wasn’t his fault. How else was he going to get any experience? Monsters that somehow made their way into the city were quickly taken care of by the Olympians, and only the Olympians were allowed to leave the city to hunt monsters.

There were times were civilians were allowed to leave under special conditions, but he was not one of such civilians. He had applied to leave twice already and each request had been refused. Why?

You didn’t meet the clearance level to leave the city.

People always muttered about how it was like being in a prison, but there was much they didn’t understand.

He’d been out in the outside world for an entire year now, and knew exactly why the VHF didn’t allow just anyone leave the city. They were protecting what was left of the human race.

He knew how many members of the rebellion had died in the last year. Even now, as he walked this unending stretch of desert waste land, he was the last of two survivors out of a team of ten that had ventured on this specific trip a month ago.

How he continued to survive remained beyond him.

Every single rebel he had interacted with since leaving California had a lot to say about how the VHF was a dictatorship that imprisoned its citizens simply because they allowed only a specific people out of the city. What they would never admit to was the logic behind it.

The VHF was protecting people. You needed a certain level of combat ability to be allowed to leave the city or your departure had to benefit the city in some way, either by commerce or information.

There was point in sending out a bunch of people with zero experience into a dangerous world. Not only would it lead to the loss of more human lives, there was also the possibility of endangering the city.

James had brought it up with one of the rebels, a girl named Isabel once. The reaction had not been nice. She’d called him a VHF worshipper and said a lot about how he was nothing but a weak man who liked to live with a yoke around his neck.

James didn’t understand how she didn’t get that the VHF were only trying to protect the human race. He’d even gone as far as explaining how allowing any random person leave could threaten the safety of the city. What happened if some inexperienced civilian stumbled on a group of monsters and instead of thinking properly, just ran all the way back to the city?

They would lead a horde straight to the city, which would lead to unnecessary casualties that could’ve easily been avoided.

Regardless, he didn’t push the argument. And Isabel had died a few weeks later to a swamp wyrm during their travels.

His team had been tasked with investigating a rumored disturbance in the west. The stories suggested that there was a monster that possessed human level intelligence that had been showing up multiple times.

What it wanted was still beyond the knowledge of the rumors. The leader of the rebels that had been sent out had gotten the instruction a month ago and sent out his team to investigate. But no one had told them just how dangerous the journey was meant to be.

It had been a while since they’d seen any other person. And the only other person they’d seen had looked too weak and broken to survive. He had a skin condition that made him look pitiable. But despite that, he was jovial and nice. A little odd in the head, but no one touched on that.

If James was being honest, he doubted anyone had expected the mage to survive. The mage had said that he’d been heading in their direction so they’d let him tag along.

Now, he was pretty much walking ahead of them, leading the way like he knew where they were going.

“How much farther do we have to walk?” James asked.

The man looked back at James and his last surviving companion, a man in his early thirties by the name of Aiden. He was an iron mage who needed something physical to transmute to iron whenever he fought.

Aiden was quiet for most of the journey which James attributed to the loss of his comrads. They were James’ comrads, too. But he couldn’t really see in them in that light. He’d grown mildly attached to them in the last year, but he’d never forgotten his true purpose.

He was with them to get stronger. If he got back alive, perhaps they would even show him to their headquarters, make him officially one of them. If they did, and he believed they would, then that would be an extra incentive for the VHF to accept him in any capacity.

The rebellion headquarter was information the VHF was even willing to pay for.

The mage in front of them stopped walking at the sight of them and folded his arms. They knew his name, because he had told them. Well, not exactly his name. He said it was a nickname given to him simply because of how he looked.

And it was fitting.

“I’d say,” the mage began, looking around in thought, as if there was something he could see beyond the vast expanse of sand around them. “Give or take one more body.”

James frowned. “What do you mean one more body?”

“I’ll need someone to help me check just how dangerous the place is before I go in,” the mage said. “I know I may not look it, but while I’m technically immortal, being hurt does hurt. If you catch my drift.”

James was confused. “That doesn’t make sense. We’re escorting you to your destination. What do you mean by one—”

The ambient mana around James trembled slightly and he got an immediate idea of what was happening. There were monsters that had abilities that affected the mana around them, but this was not such a situation. What was happening was different.

The mage looked past James to set his eyes on Aiden.

Aiden was calling the sand to him. As they rose from the ground around them, drawn to him by his magic, they turned into metallic shard. Dangerous and intimidating.

“I see your friend is the fast thinker between the both of you,” the mage said. “Too bad it simply means he has to die first.”

The malnourished man released his aura and James fell to his knees.

What he felt was monstrous, powerful enough to condone no opposition. It weighed down on him like a physical thing and he felt the acrid taste of rot in his mouth. He was dying just from being in the man’s presence now.

Behind James, Aiden struggled to stay on his feet. Shards of surrounding him like countless metal shavings all designed to wreck havoc. He had transmuted almost all the sand around them so that he stood, even if shakily, in the protecton of them.

“I guess there’s another reason for the nickname, death mage,” Aiden said, voice hard.

“Not really,” the death mage said, because only a death mage could possess an aura with so much death in it. “I think my friends just enjoyed calling me that. Some part of it, as you probably already figured out, is the irony. But what can I say. Big Man Desolate is a name that’s really grown on me.”

Aiden moved his hands about and the shards rearranged themselves, black and glistening, until they were all projectiles facing Big Man Desolate.

“You die today, death mage,” he said.

Big Man Desolate shook his head. “If I had a dollar for everytime I heard that.”

The weight of the aura doubled and James fainted. As he lulled into darkness, he worried only for one thing. Aiden was a category two Rukh mage.

What exactly did he think he could do against a Bishop.

…………..

Festus couldn’t believe what he was looking at.

“Say something,” Zed said, his voice worried.

“In his defence,” Shanine said. “He did say something else.”

Still, Festus said nothing else. What was there to say? His mind was already having a problem wrapping itself around only a section of what he was looking at. Years studying runes had taught him to control his mind.

A normal person looked at a thing and tried to comprehend it on default. It didn’t matter if it was a different language or a confusing drawing. The mind always tried to make sense of things. But as a mage who had studied runes for so long, he could see anything without trying to comprehend it.

What he didn’t understand was how Shanine was staring at it without an issue.

“What does it do?” Eitri asked.

He had pretty much glued himself to the window while the snog looked between him and the rest of them, confused.

Zed looked at the both of them as if they were overeacting.

“It doesn’t do anything deep,” he answered. “It just helps with quantification and… You know what, let me just show you. This part here is my ma—”

“No!” Festus bellowed, startling Zed.

Whatever Zed had been about to do had sent everything moving. Festus wasn’t exactly sure what Zed thought he was showing them, but something so black and ominous couldn’t be harmless.

“Please no,” he repeated, gently now. “Don’t touch anything. Don’t do anything. I want to study it but I don’t think my mind can comprehend it.”

Zed’s expression turned blank. “What the hell are you talking about? Wait. Is it inverted somehow? Is it, like, backwards reading for you guys?”

Shanine laughed. “You’re messing with them right now, right?”

“I don’t know,” Zed said, worry finally touching his voice. “At this point I don’t think it’s inverted to them. I mean, anyone can read and understand the word mana even if it’s written backwards.”

“Shit,” Eitri muttered.

Zed’s words gave Festus all the idea he needed to understand what was going on. At least to understand it a little bit.

“What exactly do you think you’re showing us, kiddo?” he asked.

“I guess some people would call it something like a status screen,” Zed answered.

Festus couldn’t stop the laugh that slipped out of his mouth. When it came loose, he wasn’t even interested in stopping it. He laughed heartily and healthily. If he were younger and freer to excessive displays he would’ve rolled off the bed and continued laughing just for exaggeration. But he was not.

His body could pull it off but his mind was too mature for it.

A status screen, he thought, unable to stop his laughter. A fucking status screen.

As for Eitri, he had figured it out too. The scowl on his face was enough proof of that.

“You have got to be kidding me.” Eitri ran a frustrated hand down his face. “You think that’s a status screen?”

Festus noted how he was specifically keeping his eyes away from what Zed was showing them. It told him that the man had not learnt how to control his mind so that he could look and not see.

Zed was looking more confused. “What else would it be?”

“That’s a fucking death… world… Over…” Eitri growled in annoyance. “That’s a fucking unreasonable rune-script. How the hell are you incorporating sigils and scripts and links and… what the fuck is even that!”

In his confused annoyance, Eitri had looked at the massive runescript in front of Zed. He doubled over, fell on his knees and clutched at his head with both hands.

“Fuck!” he swore in pain. “Can’t even look at the shit without giving myself a tumor.”

Festus was done laughing now. The first thing he paid attention to remained the fact that Shanine remained unaffected.

Was she immuned to the effect of rune somehow. It was unlikely. He’d shown her his rune book simply because she was yet to display an affinity towards magic. If she was like Zed, maybe he could get her started on runes earlier and see what could happen.

But this was different. Runes were the very fabric of the world, there was no way she was immune to their effects even when it came to comprehending them.

He was removed from his thoughts when he found Zed muttering to himself.

“So what you’re telling me,” Zed said when he noticed Festus’ attention, “is that you guys are seeing runes.”

Festus nodded. “Of various types. You know that binding rune I showed you back when you were still learning runes?”

Zed nodded. “I remember.”

“I can tell that the script you have there has at least five of them. And by the life of me I can’t recognize any rune you have up there.” Festus did his best to focus on only a single rune. It was one of the binding runes. “By the life of me, I don’t know what you’re seeing there, but it’s just impossible to imagine for me. I can’t even tell what any of the runes I’m allowed to look at does. And it’s all black.”

“That’s troubling,” Zed said.

“More troubling,” Festus added. “Is the fact that your friend over there is looking at it without any issues. I’m wondering if it has anything to do with the fact that she can’t use magic even though she’s awakened.”

Shanine looked at him as if he was saying something incredulous.

“I don’t know what you’re seeing,” she said. “But I’m just seeing a lot of lines and curves. It looks like some kind of tribal tattoo with flames at the edges.”

Festus’ brows furrowed at that. “That’s what you’re seeing?”

Shanine nodded.

Eitri pulled himself back up from his knees and pointedly did not look at Zed.

“You’re kidding me, right?” he asked. “All the kid sees is a harmless tattoo? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“A lot of different possible things,” Festus mused. “But it’s given me an idea on how to test it.”

“How?”

Festus ignored the question and turned to Shanine. “You know where his friends are, right?”

She nodded.

“That’s good. Go call the girl. The well behaved one. She should be the weakest out of all of them.”

As Shanine made her way for the door, Zed added his own request.

“Tell Ollie to tag along!”

The door closed behind Shanine. Now all Festus had to do was wait. Something told him he was about to learn something new.