Chương 134: Chapter 132: Planning and Pondering

It's not entirely accurate to say that I come back to consciousness. I never really left consciousness. I never disappeared, never lost my focus. I just cut off my attention from the world outside my body. I focused so hard that I hyperfocused, and I stopped paying attention to the world around me. So I don't come back to consciousness, but rather back to that feeling of being in the world, that feeling of knowing that I exist in context, and not just by myself.

I come back to the feel of sand beneath me, to the beating heat of the sun as it moves towards setting, to the sound of waves crashing nearby. I come back to the world, and I come back to the realization that I'm not alone. I'm surrounded by my friends. Well, four of my friends and one person that I've just met but who I greatly admire. I come back to the sounds of them moving around, and the sounds of them talking.

"Are you excited to go to the new world?" El asks. I haven't opened my eyes, so I don't know who she's talking to. But I can imagine it pretty quickly, as Gigi is the one who answers.

"I'm nervous," she says.

"I've only been through the death cycle one time. It made a difference, but you guys have been through it so many more times than I have. I feel weak in comparison."

"Nonsense," El says.

"You're not weak."

"I'd still rather go through it a few more times." There's a brief silence. In my imagination, El is shaking her head.

"You don't want that," she says.

"Dying isn't a good thing. It's not fun, and it's not worth it."

"How can you say that? You have more than double my hit points, and you're only eight levels higher than me."

"Sure, there are benefits. But there's a cost, too."

"What? You mean that whole thing where you don't want to kill dragons anymore? Big deal."

"It's more than that." Another pause. The sound of movement. Maybe she's settling down.

"I can feel the loss. We lost something when we died. We lose something every time. The more often you die, the more you lose."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean I don't feel human anymore."

"You're not human anymore." I imagine El gives Gigi a look.

"You know what I mean. I don't feel as connected to our old world. Like, I miss it. Sure. I remember it. But they don't feel like my memories anymore. It feels more like someone else has told me a story so many times that I remember it as if it happened to me, but it's not a real memory. Like when your parents tell you about something you did as a toddler. They tell you over and over again, and eventually you start to remember it. But it's not a real memory. You don't remember how you were feeling.

You remember it from the outside looking in."

"And you feel that way about Earth?"

"Yeah. I don't remember little details, and that's fine. I don't care what my locker combination was when I was in high school. I don't care that I had to put in a code to clock in at work, and I can't remember the code anymore. That's normal shit. That happens. But when I think back to my childhood, I don't remember things from the first person perspective anymore. I remember them as if I'm watching a movie."

"I have a lot of memories like that," Gigi says.

"Well, you've been through the death cycle twice now, like you said."

"No, but I always had memories like that."

"Did you? Are you sure? See, I can't be sure anymore. I don't know that things used to be different. I can only remember what I remember, you know?"

"And you think that feeling of disconnect is from the death cycle?"

"I know it is," El says.

"Just like I know that six months ago, I wasn't always so eager to fight. I wasn't always into the thrill of battle. I liked fighting at larp, sure, but it wasn't the same as it is now. I'm conditioned to fight now. It's what I do. Battle is a big part of who I am."

"You just don't like being bored."

"I never liked being bored. But this is something different. This is my bear blood, or my blood rager class, or something like that. This is my urge to get in there and fight no matter the odds, just for the thrill of it. Do you feel anything like that?"

"Not really," Gigi says.

"I usually don't want to fight. I don't mind it, and it can be fun, but I was pretty happy when we were able to talk our way past the centaurs."

"See, that pissed me off. I get that it was the right thing to do, and blah blah blah. But I wanted the fight. I wanted to see if we could take them on. I wanted the experience. Not the XP. Does that make sense?"

"You wanted to feel the rush of battle. I get that."

"It's just gotten worse since we went through the death cycle, is what I'm saying. The more times we go through it, the less we are who we used to be, and the more we are whatever it is we're becoming."

"But are you sure that's a bad thing? I mean, are you sure you don't want to be what we're becoming?" El sighs.

"I don't know," she admits.

"Maybe. But I know that I feel like I've lost something. I feel like death takes something from me every time I do it. Maybe there's a limit to how many times we can die. Maybe there isn't. Amanda doesn't seem to have found any kind of limit."

"But she's a bit off," Gigi agrees.

"I get that. She feels a bit wrong, somehow. So focused, so inhuman."

"Exactly," El says.

"And I'm afraid that's going to happen to me. To any of us. That's why I say you shouldn't try to go through the death cycle. If you get killed and it happens, well, there's nothing you can do about that. But I wouldn't go chasing it if I were you. Even with the benefits."

"Sounds like you regret it."

"I do. I know Ash doesn't. She loves the power. But that's her demon blood talking, I think. That's what she wants. The more she goes through the death cycle, the more power hungry she becomes. So she might go through it again and again if the opportunity presents itself again. If she could, I bet she'd keep going until she was way more powerful than Amanda."

"What if that's the secret to becoming a god, though? What if that's what we need to do?"

"If that's how you become a god, then I don't want to be a god. Hell, I don't want to be a god period. I'm only coming along with this crazy plan because I want to see what's out there. I don't really believe that we're going to end up deified."

"Amanda seems pretty sure of herself."

"Yeah. But she seems pretty sure of herself about everything. We don't know if even half of what she says is true. We don't know that we can trust a word that comes out of her mouth."

"She seems trustworthy to me," Gigi says.

"She definitely doesn't smell dishonest."

"You can smell dishonesty?"

"Can't you?" I open my eyes and look over at them. They immediately get quiet, as if I just walked in on them talking and they don't want me to know what they were talking about. I feel a little bit bad for eavesdropping. But it's not like they were talking about me. They had a whole conversation that didn't even mention me. I mean, there was a tangential reference to me when they talked about the centaurs, but that doesn't count, does it?

Their conversation was about each other, about their inadequacies, and about their fears of the death cycle. It wasn't about me. I notice that my meditation has gone up to 16. Nice. That puts my total skill count at 474. Getting closer to that five hundred mark, where I am assuming there will be another secret quest. I haven't completed a secret quest in a long time.

"How you doing Caleb?" El asks me. She's sitting with her knees up, arms casually resting on her knees. Her weapon is sticking out of the sand next to her, so she can pull it out as soon as she stands up if need be. Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

"I'm okay," I say.

"My brain is still kind of sorting itself out, but I'm fine."

"Do you think we're going to get to ride a dragon tomorrow?" Gigi asks me. There's so much hope and excitement in her voice. I forgot that she never got a chance to ride on Wrax.

"I hope so," I say.

"I only have about two hundred and sixty gold, but I'm hoping that it will be enough to book us passage."

"Do you have any platinum?" Gigi asks.

"I love that we're talking about it like the dragon runs tours across the ocean," El says, at the same time." I mean, it's not like it has a booth here where we can make reservations. We're just trying to bribe this hypothetical dragon that will hopefully show up some time before noon tomorrow."

"I have one platinum," I say to Gigi.

"But I don't know if that will really help. Do dragons care more about monetary value or about mass of coins? I have silver and copper. That will make a pretty big pile."

"What do we do if there isn't a dragon?" El asks.

"If noon comes and goes without a dragon showing up, what do we do? We can't swim across the ocean. We don't have time, or the know how, to build a ship that will get us across the ocean. What do we do if there's no dragon?"

"Then I guess we just don't go across the ocean," Gigi says, shrugging.

"But Amanda and Vincent are leaving in the morning," El says.

"They're going across. Probably a lot more slowly than we would be if we find a dragon. So either way, there's going to be a long time where we're separated from the both of them." That's true. Wrax could fly more than a hundred miles an hour. Amanda and Vincent can go maybe ten miles an hour. That's why it will take them a full week to make the crossing, maybe more, depending on how big the ocean is. We might make it in a matter of hours. Essentially, they're going by boat and we're potentially going by plane.

So what do we do if we get there a week before they do? And what do we do if we can't get there at all?

"Sooner or later, a dragon has to come," I say. I don't know why I'm so sure about that.

"But if it doesn't happen by noon, the beach guardian will respawn," El says.

"Then what, do we kill it again? Just the four of us?" Could we do that? I think we probably could, if we cycled out who was fighting and made sure that our stamina never got too low. It might take us an hour or even two, but we could probably kill that thing again. And then we'd be sharing the experience out to just four of us instead of six, which would mean we'd each get 137, 500 experience. That would be enough for me to level. But do I want to go through another battle like that? Absolutely not.

I will if I have to, but I don't want to.

"Maybe we can still get the dragon's attention without having to kill the guardian again," Gigi says.

"It depends on if the giant spot disappears or not."

"Let's say it does," El says.

"Do we kill it again? Can we?"

"We probably can," I say.

"It won't be easy, though. Without Amanda or Vincent, we're severely underpowered in the magic side of things. We can't reduce its armor or anything like that. Can't slow it down or blind it. None of my magic does anything like that."

"Mine either," Gigi says.

"Well," El says, smiling, "Maybe we'll get lucky and a dragon will just show up out of the blue tomorrow morning. If not, I say we go back and kill the centaurs."

"I don't want to kill the centaurs," I say, shaking my head.

"If we can't get across the ocean, we have to try to find another way. We have to get a dragon to help us fly across."

"Or we could get that griffon," Gigi says.

"They probably fly pretty far. They might be able to get us across the ocean." I hadn't considered that. Maybe we could get the griffon. But how fast can it fly? Can it maintain flight for long enough to get across an entire ocean? I don't know. I have no idea how far across the ocean actually is. It might be a few hundred miles, it might be a few thousand. There are no maps that will tell us, because maps like that require ships, and there are no ships.

"I wish we had an airship," Gigi says. We both look at her.

"You know, like in Final Fantasy and all those kinds of games? A ship that sails through the sky. Then we could all six of us fly across."

"Do you know how to get one?" El asks. Gigi shakes her head.

"They always seemed kind of stupid to me, to be honest," she says.

"The amount of force needed to lift that much weight is pretty incredible, and the ships are always designed to be like ships on water. Not aerodynamic at all."

"As long as we're wishing, we should get a jet," I say.

"Something that will fly us back and forth in a manner of hours."

"Don't be a jerk," Gigi says.

"There might actually be airships somewhere in this world." El shakes her head.

"We would've seen them by now. Or heard of them. And the cities would be designed differently."

"What do you mean?" I ask.

"When people design fantasy cities, they never design them with dragons in mind," El says.

"They always design them more like the way real cities were designed in the middle ages. Walls, sure. But nothing high enough to keep out a flying creature. Nothing designed to stop something from just floating past the wall. So nothing prepared for a flying dragon. Or for a flying ship."

"Elmspire would be pretty hard to get at through the air," I say.

"All the branches would be in the way."

"If Elmspire were the only city we'd been to, I would agree that there might be airships," El says.

"But look at Marketplace. It would be completely vulnerable to any kind of airship. That wall isn't high enough to stop someone flying over it. Plus, wouldn't Wrax have had better defenses for his cave if he worried about people flying in?" Those are all good points. I hadn't really thought about city design. How would one design a city to protect it from dragons? You'd need a lot of surface to air weapons.

Ballistae would work, but you'd want a lot of them, and it would be kind of a crap shoot to actually hit a dragon. Some kind of defensive covering, like a dome or netting through the air might help. Something that would force the dragon to go really high to get over it, or that would tangle up its wings. You'd need to be ready for whatever they spat out with their breath weapon, too. It's a daunting task.

"So no airships," Gigi says, letting out a sigh.

"Then we have to hope we can draw the dragon's attention."

"I have some gold and silver," El says.

"And he can have my broken axe if he wants it." A broken axe doesn't make for a great bribe. But when you're building a pile of stuff, it might still be helpful.

"We should clear out an area on the discoloration," I say, pushing myself to my feet.

"Something that looks like a landing pad, or somewhere we can pile up treasure. The last dragon came to investigate when we had a big pile of treasure." I head over to the discoloration. It's a bit unnerving to walk on it. This is, in essence, the corpse of the beach guardian. There are literally hundreds of arrows scattered around the discoloration, some of them sticking up out of the ground, some of them just laying on it. I start to pick them up, trying not to think about walking on a corpse.

It's not just the fact that this is a beach guardian corpse that makes me unnerved. It's a huge discoloration, reminding me of how big this thing was. It's more than walking over a grave. This thing was never supposed to be killed. It wasn't supposed to be able to be killed. It was supposed to be a monstrosity so terrifying that it would send anyone, any group of people, at any level running and screaming. It was supposed to just be a deterrent. But we killed it.

We killed something that wasn't supposed to be killed, that wasn't really even supposed to be fought. Walking on the corpse just feels wrong. It feels like I don't belong, like I'm trespassing. I'm somewhere no one was ever meant to be, somewhere that itself was never meant to exist. It's here because we killed it, and we killed it because it could die. Everything that has a hit point pool can die. But this thing was supposedly harder to kill than a god.

I laugh to myself about how Gigi, El, and I were talking about killing another one, just us and Ash. That's ridiculous. How could we hope to kill that massive beast with just us? I collect dozens of arrows, carefully putting them back into my spatial bag. I'm not going to run out of arrows any time soon, but the more of them that I can collect after using them, the longer it will be before I actually do run out. Walking across this space is surreal. It's so big. It's unfathomable how large this creature was.

And we killed it. In under an hour. I mean, it took a really long time, especially when compared to most fights. Most battles don't even last a minute. When it all comes down to it, combat is fast and brutal. Usually, it happens in a matter of seconds, not minutes. That battle took longer than a television drama, not counting commercials. As I collect the arrows, I start to make a giant X with my foot, dragging it across the discolored terrain and trying to make something that would be visible from the air.

It's not enough for the dragon to see the big discolored area; I want them to see that there is definitely something made by a sapient being, a clear signal that is trying to get their attention. That, I think, will maximize our chances of a dragon actually coming down to check it out. By the time I finish making my big X, I can smell food cooking. More land shark meat, I bet. Ash is probably cooking. I know how to cook, but I'm nowhere near as good at it as she is. She likes it.

Maybe she'll eventually retire and start a restaurant or something. Is it weird to be thinking about retiring? We've only been adventurers for a few months at this point. Most people don't think of retiring until they've been at something for years, a decade at least. I can't imagine what we'll be like a decade from now. What level will we be? Is this life sustainable? Or will we be forced to retire early, either for psychological reasons or just because our bodies give out?

It doesn't seem like our bodies are capable of giving out. But I suppose if regeneration stopped, I'd want to stop adventuring. If I could only heal through magic, I'd be hesitant. If my pools recharged at a rate of one every ten minutes instead of one a minute, I'd seriously consider a new career as a crafter. Would El, though? She doesn't seem like she wants to retire any time soon. She wants to keep fighting. She wants to go to this new world to find new enemies, new battles. She wants to keep going.

It's admirable, I guess. Maybe it is weird of me to be thinking about quitting so quickly. Hopefully, we're about to go somewhere far more dangerous than anything we've seen before. Thinking about retiring now might just be a cold feet kind of reaction. A fear of the unknown. I'm not sure what we're going to face, so I'm wondering if I want to just stay here. Remain a big fish in a little pond. Is that so wrong? Is it bad to be a big fish in a small pond?

Is there something noble about always trying to find a bigger pond? I mean, I don't owe anyone anything. I could stay here, where I'm strong. I could stay here and be the most powerful player on the continent. We could head back to Marketplace, to Elmspire, maybe even to Mountspeak. We could investigate this world, playing kind of on god mode, before we try to cross the ocean. Maybe that's what I'll suggest if a dragon doesn't come in time.

Maybe I'll suggest that we head to the other ocean, walk the world a bit, and see what we can find. Then we can come back. Then we can kill the beach guardian. By then we'll all be higher level. We'll all have better spells and better abilities, because we'll know what to look for. We'll be better suited for life in that more dangerous world. Is that the coward's way out?