Chương 129: 128 - Bad Feeling

Alexandra sat on the bed she had chosen for herself. Compared to her bed in the Iron Library, it was a lot less comfortable, and it smelled like it hadn't been washed in a while. For the first time in her life, she regretted not having completed her Cleaning skill quest before coming here.

"Ah, fuck." She had also skipped Swimming and Diving, which would have been easier near the sea. Alexandra grimaced, but she quickly recovered her wits. Those skills were not that important anyway, and a few more contribution points wouldn't change her life. Hopefully. She flipped the pages of her journal and examined her status, coming up with a shortlist of skills that used mana. First were Drain Life and Aggressive Assimilation. The good news was that those skills hadn't seemed affected during the fight.

The bad news was that she couldn't really run more tests now. The next thing she wanted to try was her enchantments. She grabbed her old robes from her pack and felt the ambient mana coursing through them. With a thread of solar mana, she connected to the ambient mana and tried convincing it to make the robes float. It didn't work. But the ambient mana was extremely reactive to her touch, as if it were afraid of her new mana. Alexandra shifted her approach and started threatening the mana to act as she wished.

She dug a thread of will into the mana and squeezed. Move. Now. The mana recoiled instead, bunching at the seams of the robes. Alexandra swore and pulled harder, forcing a second solar mana thread in the robes, but the resistance only stiffened. The robes stayed flat and lifeless across her knees.

"Fine." She flexed her fingers.

"We'll do this the hard way." She isolated a single strand of the ambient mana and crushed it between two threads of her own. The strand screamed, or at least, she thought it did. The rest of the mana in the robes convulsed, pulling away from the wound. Good. She let the dead strand dissolve and moved to the next one.

"You're going to hold this shape," she said.

"Every time you refuse, I take another one. There are a lot of you. I only need a few." She snapped a second strand. Then a third. The mana in the robes began to shudder as a whole, a single current bending away from her, searching for anywhere she wasn't touching. On the sixth strand, something gave. The remaining mana flattened itself along the weave of the robe, docile, waiting. Alexandra exhaled and sent the command again, gentler this time, almost coaxing. Float.

The robe lifted an inch off her knees and hung there, trembling.

"Good," she said.

"This is workable." She could already see this new enchantment style working with Mana Persuasion, which she still hadn't unlocked. The combination of Life Curse, Dark Bolt, Inflict Weakness, and Curse Unraveling worked as usual, if not better than before. In fact, Curse Unraveling actually benefited from solar mana, which seemed to naturally reject curses. Alexandra never had an easier time cleansing her core, though admittedly, she only allowed the weakest curse to set in.

She wasn't looking forward to more sicknesses and maledictions. Curse Unraveling 13 -> 14 Soon after, Willow and Kam found their way to the room.

"How are you feeling?" Alexandra asked as they entered.

"Fine," Kam said.

"Sorry."

"Don't worry about it. But you can't be so weak. This place is dangerous, and…" Alexandra trailed off.

"I know. The people who killed my grandfather might be after me." Willow put her pack down in a corner.

"So, what's the plan?"

"We figure out if there's a better town in the Gray Basin," Alexandra said.

"This place sucks." Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

"True. I'd rather not settle here," Willow agreed.

"Even the Hands were rude."

"Let's rest for an hour. Then we'll inquire. You're good with that, Kam?" The boy nodded, lying down on his bed. As her two companions rested, Alexandra figured she might as well try her final mana skill. Light. She'd overlooked it earlier, thinking that there was no way solar mana wasn't compatible with a spell like that. Sure enough, she channeled mana into the skill, and a bright orb materialized out of her hands. As it appeared, she noticed that the shade of the light was different, warmer, more alive.

But it wasn't just the color that was warmer. A burst of heat washed into the room, as if she had just opened the door of an oven.

"Fuck!" She flinched, shutting down the skill right away.

"What was that?" Willow asked.

"Did you try casting Solar Burst inside the room?"

"No, that was Light," Alexandra said, a frown on her face.

"Well. Maybe don't try anything in here. We don't want to burn the place down." They left an hour later, the sun already setting over the rooftops. The town wasn't much. Mud-brick houses leaned into each other, a well, a market square that had maybe a dozen stalls still open. Alexandra asked the first person she found: an old woman selling a handful of vegetables, her hands cracked from hard labor.

"Another town?" the woman repeated her question.

"There's Balrum. Other side of the basin. Good luck getting there."

"What's wrong with getting there?"

"Mud wastes." The woman jerked her chin west.

"Swallow a cart whole if you don't know the paths. People go missing every year."

"Is there a way around?"

"Yeah. There's always a way around. But it will add months to your trip." The woman shrugged.

"There's a caravan leaving tomorrow, if you're set on it. Talk to Oren. He should be at the stables past the well." Oren wasn't hard to find. He stood in the middle of a fenced yard, checking the hooves of a mule with practiced gestures that suggested he'd done this ten thousand times and would do it ten thousand more. He had broad shoulders, gray threading his beard, and a knife at his hip.

"Hello," Willow said, letting Alexandra fade into the background.

"Are you Oren?"

"I am. You want in on the caravan?" he asked, without looking up.

"News travels fast," Willow said.

"Not a hard guess." He set the mule's hoof down and straightened, studying the three of them.

"Nobody wants to stay in Oldwater. You've got coin?"

"Depends on the price."

"Depends on what you're carrying, how much you weigh, and how much trouble you are." He wiped his hands on a rag hanging from his belt.

"Makes the trip smoother if I know what I'm dealing with."

"We're not trouble," Willow said.

"It's just us three, and our packs." Oren almost smiled.

"Everyone says that." He nodded toward a bench near the fence.

"Sit. Let's talk." They went over it. Oren didn't waste words. He named a price, high enough that Willow opened her mouth to argue, but he cut her off before she started.

"That's for three seats and your gear. You want protection on top of that; it's more. Wastes have things in them besides mud." He looked at her hands, then at Kam's thin arms, and his expression sharpened.

"Are you any good in a fight?"

"Good enough," Willow said, Alexandra hovering behind her.

"Silvers are given, Golds a maybe," he added.

"Silvers we can deal with. For Golds, we can help," Willow said.

"We'll see." He spat to the side, not unkindly.

"Half now, half when we reach Balrum. Understood?"

"Understood," Willow said.

"Caravan leaves at first light. Don't be late. I don't wait for anyone, paying or not." He held out a hand, calloused. Willow shook it.

"Pleasure," Oren said, in a tone that made it hard to tell if he meant it. The three of them walked off in search of a place to eat dinner.

"What do you think?" Alexandra asked.

"He seemed competent enough," Willow said.

"But it's not like we have a choice."

"We could stay here," Alexandra said.

"It's a shithole, but it's safe."

"No." Kam stared at her.

"Not safe." He pointed at the palisade surrounding the town.

"Tense." Alexandra frowned as she understood what he was getting at. The guard at the gate had been aggressive, more so than in Esmera and Kator, which meant that ill-intentioned people often knocked on that gate. They ended up in the Broken Wheel's hall. Dinner was thin broth and bread that had gone stale by midday. The innkeeper watched them eat from behind the counter without pretending not to.

"Passing through?" she asked when Alexandra caught her staring a third time.

"Caravan tomorrow," she said. Something flickered across her face.

"Balrum, then." She set down the rag he'd been using to wipe the same spot on the counter for the last five minutes.

"Shame you're not staying."

"Why's that?" She didn't answer. She just picked the rag back up and went to the other end of the counter. They were the only patrons that night. Outside, the wind had picked up. The shutters banged.

"We should turn in," Alexandra said.

"Early start tomorrow." They climbed the narrow stairs to their room, Kam first, then Willow, Alexandra last, glancing one last time at the door of the inn before the stairwell swallowed the sight of it. The room was as it had been. Alexandra sat on her bed and pulled her boots off, but she left her sword within reach, and she noticed Willow doing the same. Alexandra lay back and stared at the ceiling, counting the cracks in the plaster until her eyes adjusted to the dark.

Kam's breathing evened out first, then Willow's. She stayed awake a while longer, listening to the wind. She didn't sleep well. By the time the sky outside the shutters turned gray, she was already dressed, pack slung over her shoulder, more than ready to never see this town again.