Chương 84: Outbreak

The morning brought a new broadsheet. I bought a copy for a copper bit, and carried it with me to the dining hall for breakfast. While I waited in line (because titles of courtesy do not let you cut in line at the Academy) I opened the newspaper and skimmed the articles. And, finally, I saw the one that somehow I had still hoped I would not find. A blight. Some kind of unwholesome spoilage was affecting the cranberry bogs in the southern provinces. So far news was slight, and investigations were ongoing.

Nobody was quite certain how far this went or how thorough the contagion had spread. The blight, that is. The Berry Blight. What a whimsical name. Ha ha. The first part of the five-part, five-year plotline for the game. The first of the disasters, which I had been anticipating for my entire life as Natalie. I picked up a big bowl of potato soup with minced bacon, ginger and thyme, and carried it back to my table.

Elica was there with what looked like a taster's flight of deviled eggs, some of them pretty exotic, and a fruit salad.

"Make sure there's no berries in that salad," I said, pushing the newspaper towards her, and sat down across from her.

"Wha- ew? A blight? An 'unwholesome corruption' of fruit upon the growing branch or the traveling basket, it says," she grimaced and started sorting through her fruit salad, picking out bits. Larianne and Vancy arrived while a scrunch-nosed Elica was still at work. Vancy glanced at me, blinking big round eyes.

"What's she doing?"

"Getting the necromancy out of her breakfast," I said calmly, and took a bite of my soup. It was pretty good. Elica and Vancy both recoiled.

"Necromancy?"

"Nec- Natalie, you can't joke about that!"

"Not joking," I said sadly.

"I was hoping, all along, that this part of the visions would not come to pass. That maybe something I had already changed had gotten rid of this future. But it's still here. I was not free to prevent it. And now it's too late to do more than mitigate the damage."

"This just says that there's an affliction affecting the berries," Elica said, tapping the newspaper.

"It doesn't say anything about necromancy!" Vancy looked hopeful again.

"Maybe it's not that at all! Are you sure, Natalie?"

"I'm entirely sure," I said, resigned and depressed. Larianne was looking at me like I was holding a low pair but trying to bluff a straight.

"Let me see," she said, and reached for Elica's saucer where she had been stacking cranberries. For once, Larianne used her nails to lift them, pinching a berry between two of her long, tapered talons. She held it upright, examined it from different sides. And then a tiny gust of purple flame burst off the berry, and evaporated in an instant. Larianne grimaced, and ate the berry.

"She wasn't wrong," she said to Vancy.

"The hell was that?" I asked. Larianne rolled her eyes.

"Under the polish, my nails have sigils to react to necromancy. I activated them."

"Activ- activated? Sigils don't activate, they're either on or they're off," Elica said suspiciously. Vancy turned her glowing excitable eyes onto the dark, silent member of our troupe.

"You mana-activated them?! Larianne, are you a warrior!? Can you use magic weapons!?" Larianne looked disgusted with all of us.

"Right now, you're thinking all kinds of ideas. I promise you, all the ideas you've had so far are stupid. Just leave it be." I looked at the other two. Not even Elica was going to leave it be. But we did suspend that conversation for the time being. I jumped back in to give the goth girl some slack.

"So, a necromantic blight, and it's all the way to Hearstcliff before the newspapers are reporting it," I said.

"That's not good at all, is it?" Vancy looked startled.

"Oh! This is going to get a lot of people sick! We should warn someone!"

"It's already under control," I said.

"How do you know?" Elica blurted out the dumbest question she could think of. As if I have not been very clear so far about visions of the future. I looked across the cafeteria. His usual table, near the Princess Lachel, was empty. Nathan was already on the job. Good to see that this version of him is good at his job. Good job brother. Start the quest. Save lives. Be the hero. Earn the glory. In Geography class, I stopped at the same desk as usual and set down a truffle.

"Raspberry creme," I told her. Harvested before the trouble started. It's going to be one of the last chances to enjoy raspberry for a while.

"thankyou," Belisa Roadaway said, without moving. I paused, and leaned my hand against her desk, a few fingers splayed out. She reached up, and set her hand on top of mine for a moment, and then picked up the candy and started to methodically open it. I walked away, leaving her to it. I don't know what [The Broken] has to offer, but reaching out to her feels good. It feels like what I should do. It feels like one of my only chances to make Nathan proud. I sat and stared down at my own hands a while.

This class had nothing for me. My parents had hired excellent tutors, somewhat overestimating the degree of training I would need. And then the Intellect mechanics went and nerfed the challenge down for me. I'm guaranteed the valedictorian position unless the only other wild card, Nathan, suddenly hits the books and starts developing his academics at the expense of everything else. But most importantly, because I know damn well that my graduation from this school means absolutely nothing to me.

Something about that feels so sad sometimes. Most of the other students here are so excited. You can see it on them almost all the time. Some of them have spent their whole lives studying, practicing and anticipating this education here. Their parents had saved up and hung their hopes on this. This was a real avenue of social change and advancement, a way for people who work hard and have talent to really climb the ladder.

Having something like legacy admissions that guarantee spots to aristocrats like me is frankly insulting to the whole institution and most of the students who will have worked so hard for this. And especially if those students really don't even need the opportunities that an Academy graduation would offer. And especially me; I'm just here because this is where the story takes place. I could fail all these classes and never think twice about it, all I want is permission to be on the school grounds.

And instead I am going to take the top spot in the class rankings. Not because I need it, not because I earned it- no, just because it opens up quest lines that I'm interested in. The earliest of those is the tomb-robbing quest for my math class. It gets assigned early and you just have to finish it before the end of the year. Most new players try to take care of it early, and find out that it is unreasonably hard.

The pro strat is to lock it in early, and then wait until late in the year to make the attempt, when you've got as much equipment and levels as possible. The next of them is going to be from my geography class, but not for some weeks yet. Spaced out some, to introduce new parts of the game world bit by bit- most of which I've already visited. I had not respected the developer's sense of pace and progression at all, that's for sure. And I had to admit that this was probably part of why I'm so stressed out.

Nathan, so far, has arrived at school, gotten settled in his classes, and met some cute girls, all with very different backgrounds and personalities. He's had some interactions and maybe flirted some. He's getting started with his studies, and started taking fencing lessons. And he's probably fielded a lot of questions and rumors about his nefarious sister. And then, starting just this morning, he's hearing about a crop pestilence that is affecting his home duchy. So he's going to start investigating it.

He's got a few different avenues to check; some teachers he can question, some local merchants to track, some of his love interests are going to have useful information. I'm glad that Kurumi is still available to him right now, and Josse, Dizzy and Sicimmi. More than enough opportunities, he can pick his path to solving this mystery.

Right now nobody else in Hearstcliff is interested enough in the provinces, nobody in Meadowtam has the resources to devote to this, the official authorities are being hampered by orders from above, and the few people really concerned by this are either too busy trying to survive or just don't have the skills and sharp wits that Nathan has. He'll be fine. I'll have to check in on him every few days to see that he's doing all right, I don't want him to actually fail the mission.

If I have to slip him some pointers I will, but it shouldn't be necessary. This stage is all about investigation, and his current build is very good at investigation. Me, I've got foreknowledge and walkthroughs, it doesn't matter that my build really sucks at this kind of work. What matters is that he's taking those steps and knocking out those quest checkpoints. I am going to want him well leveled up before this game runs its course.

And as long as I can focus on that, I can pretend that hundreds of thousands of people aren't seeing food shortages, delivery breakdowns, malnutrition, vitamin deficiencies, and growing poverty. Crop failures, farms repossessed, famine. We're only a few weeks away from refugee camps in Meadowtam. In the game, it's something we hear about, but Nathan can't travel from Hearstcliff, he never sees it. I sit at my desk, and stare up at the maps spread on the walls of the geography classroom.

The rivers and hills, the utterly-arbitrary borders between the duchies and marches. Those lands have people, and those people are in trouble. Knowing what I know feels like an obligation. It feels like I have a duty to see this with my own eyes, to travel out to the hardest hit areas and help them, or at least to witness them. To mourn properly. But I wonder if that won't be the tragedy that breaks me entirely. Immersing myself in a man-made catastrophe is not good for mental health, is it?

For an hour I wrestle with these ideas, whether I should distance myself or not. I notice, briefly, that Belisa is unwrapping the truffle I've brought her. She's eaten every one so far, and I hope it's helping her. If I can't tend my own psychological well-being, there's others I can help instead. Threeday passed in a blur. Classes, planning, coping. A hundred things that took up my day and got in the way of adventuring. Gala Kralcit assured me that she's gotten the supplies and is ready to start work.

But even on a Threeday afternoon, there are limits to how slowly time can pass, and by sixteenth bell Tiviti and I were meeting on the quad. She was again in mismatched armor, with bangles of jewelry and her sword and scabbard held in hand.

"Same place?" she asked, tense with anticipation.

"Similar, not the same," I said.

"I don't want to concentrate our attacks too much. If they feel too much pressure, if we attack too persistently, they'll rouse themselves to strike back. Better to cull a bit, and move away, and return to cull them further later on. The creatures at this next site are generally weaker, so you may need to fight harder to really get that satiation."

"Hmm," she said, noncommittally.

"I brought out boots that can stick to walls. If you can put me there we won't need a boat this time."

"Good thinking," I said.

"I'll work with that. Let's fight some monsters." A luminous door opened, and I handed her a pair of leather-and-steel goggles. She put hers on just like I did mine, and then we stepped in. The exit door appeared hanging in the air, a great distance above the water. A steel-mesh grate materialized in the air next to it, and hovered there as if everything was fine and gravity had signed off on this exception. We stepped out, and our boots rang on the metal. Deafening roar of waterfall surrounded us from all sides.

"Not as important to stay quiet this time!" Tiviti said, tugging off her goggles and handing them to me.

"A- hey, what are we standing on?"

"I thought it'd be better to have someplace to stand still," I said, accepting the goggles and dispelling them to vanish without a trace. Tiviti looked from them, to the steel platform, to the water far below. She gave me a strained, incredulous look.

"What?" I said.

"Nothing," she said, still clearly tense.

"Um, could you take us someplace more stable than a quarter-inch of impossible flying floor that disappears if you ignore it?"

"Certainly," I said, and we coasted away. The glowing door hung in the air to give us something to navigate by, even as she activated the sigils on her helmet to give her night vision. I relied on my affinities to tell me when we got too close to the ceiling or the water, and kept moving away from the void-door. What little light we had faded behind us. I released that door and created a new one, just to get its light once more.

The glaring searchlight blazed out, a cone of harsh white that cut the everlasting darkness and reflected off the shadowy shrouding water.

"Here we are," I said. Tiviti was acting weird, standing in the center of the platform without moving or looking around at all. We were moving fast enough to ruffle my hair pretty well, but not a really dangerous degree of speed. But now we were coming to the edge of the cavern, where the ceiling arches down towards the edge of the water. We were still ten feet away when she leaped out as if she was eager to be off the platform, and landed boots-first on the wall.

She stuck like Spider-Man, and looked relieved to have something under her feet, even if it wasn't actually under. Whatever. I dispelled the platform since I didn't have anyone to carry but myself, and just flew with my essence of the air. She panned around, as if searching.

"Not as many as the first cave."

"It's wider, they prefer to group where the food bottlenecks together," I said.

"There's two over to your right." I brought more light closer to us so we could see each other better, but the light reflecting off the water did not help us see what was beneath. Still, I had my sorcerer's senses and she had some kind of warrior's senses, and those helped. She drew her sword, and again she readied it like a bow and arrow. With sharp, darting stabs, the blade lanced out long and needle-like, stabbing through the water and bringing up blood.

The smell of it in the water stirred interest- these were fish, not sharks, but blood in the water is blood in the water. More bodies slowly gravitated our way. Tiviti stood on the wall. Her hair and armor still treated her feet as downward, she was not just sticking like a spider she was repositioned and to her I was definitely hovering at a weird angle. To her, the cave was now a giant mirror of water standing upright, without spilling, and filled with monsters. I shuddered at that thought. Gods how awful.

She speared a couple more, noticing their more subtle presence before I did. I was concentrating on a larger disturbance headed our way.

"I've got about thirty headed this way. How many of them do you want?" She laughed a little manically.

"Oh, so generous!" She considered, eyes narrowed.

"All of them." I curved water, and started the currents.

"Bringing them to you," I said, as I created feeder currents to stop the creatures from flailing their way out of the flow. Tiviti's blade made only the tiniest sounds as it broke the surface of the water again and again, lost in the thundering reverberations of the waterfall only a mile away. This underground lake did not look like a cave. It looked like a stone wall, a watery surface, and then an endless abyss where the far side would never be seen.

On reflection, I think that Hearstwhile might have more cave development than Earth does. I concentrated on using the water currents to steer, lasso and flush the monsters underneath. Some of them I was able to force pretty close to the surface, enough to get a glimpse of the pale limbs, translucent skin. The distorted bodies and limbs that had evolved proportions different than ours, growing towards something we could not recognize. At least we couldn't see the faces. Tiviti lanced them, splitting open bodies.

Their blood was lurid red and dyed the water brightly- it did not look like blood diluted in water, it just looked like they were swimming in their own blood now. Every time she ruptured a body and it stilled I would release it from the trap, sinking towards the long-gone bottom. She would stab, and I would narrow the field so she was not accidentally slaying the dead again. And she was feeling it- I don't know if she had a XP mechanic like a player character but there was something going on.

She was panting, and growling under her breath, her body tense and her face a picture of perfect focus. She crouched on the wall and murdered monsters and she fed on those deaths in some way I was not qualified to understand. If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

"Enough," she said, eventually. But she still stabbed through the last three of the subterranean terrors.

"I am content. Thank you."

"Good," I said.

"I'm gonna give this gang a great big send off, and then I'm gonna get us out of here."

"As you will," she said.

"This has been gratifying." I threw my grasp out far, deep into the water. I crafted void, a superdense black hole that started siphoning water. The lake spiraled towards that singularity, compressing as it went. Far off in another direction, a second. Back the way we came, a third singularity. All of them pulling, disrupting the lake's currents. Directly below us, dozens of crushing meters deep, I placed a fourth weapon.

And then I curved water, steering it faster and stronger into the voids, force-feeding the black holes. With four singularities out, the most I had ever placed, I could feel my limits straining slightly. Closing in on dangerous territory, ever more as they consumed and devoured, swallowing up the water with incredible speed, and anything trapped in that water.

I channeled essence of void, not to dull my personality but just generally, flooding myself with the affinity, until I could feel those whirling sorcerous maelstroms. Their connection to me was visceral now, I could feel them like my hands, like my knuckles. Not a mana manipulation, not a math problem, this was my strength that was doing this. And I glowed. Behind me, Tiviti looked concerned.

"Heeeeey, Natalie?.... what is that you're doing?"

"Something for them to remember," I chuckled. White light emerged from my skin and hair and eyes, the affinity becoming visible. Portal light, emerging from me. The benthic nightmares were scrambling away, but they could not always find 'away'. The currents were how they navigated, their senses were scrambled. In this noisy lightless abyss, everything they could rely on was now upended in my hands. Some were too close to escape before they noticed.

Schools of flickering grotesqueries flitted between the vortices, trying to find a way through but only confused enough to throw themselves back to danger.

"That should be enough," I muttered.

"I am so fucking glad these things don't have a god to pray to." I released all the voids simultaneously. The lake leaped out of its bed. The entire surface of the water sprang up a dozen feet in the air, hesitated for a hovering second, and crashed back down with a noise like the end of the world. The air was full of mist, water vibrated into a higher state, and it all smelled of ozone instead of fish. Rocks the size of refrigerators fell out of the ceiling and crashed into the murky water.

Dust sifted down, turning the mist muddy. Imagine the week I've had, the year that I've been having. The years before that. Now think about how satisfying it can be to hit something really hard, punching a wall or pillow or bag. Now, instead of your hand, imagine all your frustration and rage are poured into four exploding black holes all at once. It was very satisfying. [You have earned 19 experience points. You are now a Level 6 Sorceress. You have earned 28 experience points. You have 28 experience points.] [You have advanced the Huntress affinity.] With the way that's broken up.... I'm guessing that I've almost hit the limit of what I can earn by hunting these beasts in the wild. It needed to calculate my Level 5 kills separately from my Level 6 kills, because you can only get credit for monsters of your level or higher. And, of the creatures killed in there, there were only 28 killed that were of or above 6th level.

Not to take away from the fact that I am absolutely wholesaling these experience points, and leveling up much-"What the fuck was that?" Tiviti asked, staring down at the water's surface. She was aghast.

"It's an attack that takes a long time to charge up, requires specific conditions and circumstances, and is a lot more effective in a liquid medium than other environments," I said.

"And I used a lot more of it than is normally advisable. I checked that we are nowhere near any human settlements, because this was definitely a significant seismic event and-" The tall warrior scanned the area with definite awe on her face.

"This isn't a lake anymore, it's soup. There's so much... I came to hunt, you came for a massacre." I sighed, heaving it out until I felt hollow and slack. So much tension gone. Sometimes violence is so much more therapeutic than a massage.

"I'd agree with you if I didn't know how many of these things there still are out there in the world, and that we've only put a drop in the bucket here. This was a big strike, but a massacre?...."

"How-" she said, looking over the steaming, stinking stew that was the lake. Chowdered monsters were so evenly distributed throughout that it really did not seem like water anymore, actually.

"This should not be possible."

"We live in interesting times," I said.

"Hey, I'm gonna get us out of here before something that likes soup can show up."

"Not straight back to the school," she said.

"A real sky, for a time." I set us down on a hill several miles away from Hearstcliff, with a good view of the land for a long way around us, and a good view of the hard, untwinkling, very real stars above, and the occasional drift of an honest cloud. Something that felt not at all like caves or campuses or geodes or lakes. After a few minutes, my skin stopped glowing again.

"There were.... thousands?" she said.

"Thousands of them. A city of monsters in that lake."

"Thousands," I confirmed.

"Yeah." It's true. The number of creatures in there could be expressed in multiples of thousands, rounding down.

"I can't help feeling that my contributions there were rendered moot and meaningless when you pulverized the whole space."

"First of all, you cannot think of it in those terms," I said.

"It is good to take pride in good results. But pride in our own works should never be compared to another. When you do that, your dignity and fulfillment come from outside yourself, when they ought to come from within."

"Wisdom I did not expect from you."

"I'm terrible about this but I've got a brother that gives great advice and I listen to what he says well enough to parrot it back, even if I'm a massive hypocrite. Secondly, before we graduate you are going to need as much training as possible in slaying these beings. Today was good for dividends that will pay off in the long term."

"You have no doubts."

"None at all," I admitted. I kicked my boots and sock off and ran my feet along the grass.

"Will we ever go back to that cave?" Tiviti asked, leaning back on her hands.

"It'll repopulate," I said.

"The rest of the creatures downstream will notice the smell and general brothiness, and come to investigate. That area is now so rich in food that it's likely to attract a lot of attention. Hopefully some of them will choose to fight each other for territory, as well. That place... nothing edible goes to waste. The bodies we mangled will be used to feed the others, and they'll get stronger, or breed more of them. Still, it's enough for now. It helped, it'll make a difference."

"If you say so," Tiviti said.

"This is your visions?"

"Yes," I said.

"I don't recall telling you about that."

"You've not gone to any pains to conceal that you have odd sources of information, making confident declarative statements about what remains yet to be," she said, craning her neck around to stared down at me. Even seated she was sharply taller than me. Almost thin enough to call 'spindly', but she certainly seemed much larger than me.

"And so I looked about just a bit, and it seems that it is a matter of public record, entered as fact in a legal proceeding, that you have visions of the future and present and the past as well. But, there does not seem to be recognized parameters." I brushed hair off my face.

"Yeah, that's not an accident. If I talk about it too much people try to figure out how to use it for their advantage. So my rules are simple: when I say I've seen something, I've seen something. Don't ask more than that."

"And people abide by that ultimatum?" she sounded surprised.

"Usually I make it very clearly implied that there is a very hard rebuff waiting for anyone that pushes me on this issue," I said. Tiviti reached into her pocket, and drew out a brooch. She stared at it, glanced over at me. A considering look, I think. Like she was weighing options. If I didn't know better, she was considering giving it to me?... but instead she put it away and we sat in silence for a while.