Chương 183: Chapter 181: Into the dark

"Should we keep resting?" I ask Vincent. He meditated for a while too, but I don't know if he got much out of it. His only real resource that he cares about is mana, and that isn't even draining right now. Maybe it drains a little bit every time he tries to cast flight on himself, but he regenerates fast enough that it doesn't really matter.

"I'm ready to move on," he says with a shrug.

"I wish I could heal, though."

"Yeah, me too. One point a minute takes forever."

"My stamina came back a little bit faster while I was meditating, but not by very much. I have to learn that breathing technique Ash is doing." He looks pained, and not from the little cuts and scrapes he incurred during the battle. I think I understand. Vincent has put all of his focus, ever since the tutorial, into magic. He is a mighty archmage, but right now he's just a liability. Without magic, he has nothing. It makes me wonder if we're going to run into the same problem for El.

The way Vincent has done with magic, she did with physical attacks. What is she going to do if we get our magic back but face something that is impervious to our attacks? Will she feel like a burden when she can't do any damage to our next attacker? That's something to worry about when it comes. I suppose she can at least tank the damage when that happens. It ends up being about an hour before everyone is ready to move. Even with all that time, El still isn't at full health.

She is above twenty five thousand, but only just barely. Ash is still down several thousand hit points, too. Gigi is fully healed. She's the only one. But we don't want to keep wasting time. We need to move. I find Amanda's trail, and we start following her further up the mountain. As we go, I have to wonder what is really driving us forward at this pace. We are catching up to Amanda, I think, but why does that matter? Shouldn't we have waited until we were all healed? That would've been the smart thing.

That would've meant more than a day of loitering in that cave. Maybe it's a matter of not being willing to do that. I know I don't want to wait. It would be boring to wait a day and a half just for my little wounds to close. We're healthy enough. We can face another battle if we have to. We follow the cave as it moves up the inside of the mountain. I have no idea how high we are now. We've got to be at least a thousand feet up. Maybe two. There's no way to check. But we keep moving.

We come across the body of another cave golem. Its stony flesh is so carved with little cuts that it looks like Amanda hit it over a thousand times. Death by a thousand cuts, in a very literal sense of the word. There's a fair amount of blood in the area, which has that same sweet smell as the rest of her blood. This battle must have taken her a really long time. I wonder how close she came to death. Did she wait around to heal, or did she just keep moving?

I know she regenerates the same as El, but did she give herself some time to recover, or is she being pushed forward? Does she know we're chasing her again? Does she care? I can't tell if she stayed for long. There is a place where she clearly sat for at least a little while; there are streaks of blood running down either side of the little rock outcropping. I'd estimate she waited there at least half an hour. Maybe longer, if she stopped bleeding before she got back up.

If the battle took her the same amount of time, that means that even with our battle against the golems, we're still catching up. We're still getting closer.

"What do we do if we catch her?" Ash asks me as we continue hiking.

"Do we join up with her? Do we try to stop her?"

"Do you want to stop her?" I ask.

"Do you think she shouldn't become a god for some reason?" Ash thinks about it for a long moment. I almost have to prompt her, thinking she got distracted, before she finally does answer.

"I don't see any reason to stop her, no. Just the thought that people shouldn't become gods. But that's hypocritical of me. Especially since I intend to do it myself. So I can't very well stop her, can I? Should I? What if only one person a century can ascend?"

"That's something I hadn't considered." Amanda would know if that was true. We could ask her if we catch her. But what if it is true? What do we do then? Do we stop her so that Ash can ascend instead? Is that fair?

"It could be a rule," Ash says.

"What will you do if it is, and we don't get to her in time?" Ash shrugs.

"I guess I won't become a god." She sounds so disappointed. Like someone just kicked her puppy. I want to assure her that she'll still have a chance. I want to promise her that she'll get to be a god. But I don't know. It sounds like a rule that could be in place, and we don't know. Once again, we don't know what's going on. We don't know what the rules are. We have to rely on guesswork and logic to try to figure out how the world works. It's frustrating. Granted, the same was true back on Earth.

No one knows how the world works there. You have to guess how the future is going to go. No one can predict reality stars as presidents, or people putting greed above the good of humanity. Well, maybe you can predict those things, but they still seem to happen to a greater extent than is believable. And back on Earth, we at least had someone telling us what the rules used to be. That's what parents are for. They do their best to train you, to prepare you for the way the world works.

My parents did their best to get me ready for the world. They taught me all the rules they knew. Unfortunately, the world changed in unpredictable ways. There was a pandemic, there was an explosion of racism and systemic violence. All the bad things that were broiling under the surface exploded, seemingly at once. I lived in unprecedented times, and there was a world changing once-in-a-lifetime event every year, seemingly. The rules changed drastically from what they used to be. Enjoying the story?

Show your support by reading it on the official site. I don't blame my parents. I really don't. They couldn't know that the rules were changing any more than anyone else did. But the fact remains that I was prepared for a world that stopped existing. And now I'm in another world, because even that new world stopped existing. What little progress I had made towards figuring out the rules of the new world was wiped away when the tutorial started. I thought that this world would be easier.

It was a world based on game mechanics. On rules. There are rules for everything, and everything is fair. But that just makes things even more frustrating. I know that there are rules, but I don't know what they are. No one ever told me. Every other player, every other person who came from Earth, was told the rules of the game by their tutorial god. They learned about this new world before they ever set foot in it. They were told the rules. They had things explained to them. We didn't.

We've had to scratch and claw our way into understanding every step of the way. And now, even as we approach what should be the pinnacle of the game, we don't know what we're getting into. What if we do all this questing and there is a rule that only allows Amanda to ascend? What if only one person can ever ascend from this mountain, and we miss our chance by a few minutes? What if it's only one person a year, or one a generation, or one a century? Those rules could be in place. Amanda knows them.

Amanda knows everything that I want to know. But we don't. It's frustrating. But what can we do?

"I guess we just keep going and hope," I say, answering my own question. Ash just nods. She's clenching her jaw and looking ahead on the path we're walking. I can see the strain in her neck. I don't know if she's fighting back tears of rage or frustration or just clenching her jaw to keep emotion from showing on her face. I put a hand on her shoulder to try to give her some semblance of support. It's the best I can manage. She gives me a smile, and I know that it's helping, at least a little bit.

Sometimes all you can do is be there with someone when they're upset. Sometimes you can't fix anything. But being a friend still helps. The cave ahead of us starts to get darker and darker. Gigi's torch has guttered out, so we're dependent on ambient light and our dark vision to keep us going. I don't know if it's going to last very much longer. The tunnel keeps getting darker, and the fungus is getting thinner and more sparse. Eventually, I can barely see a few inches in front of my face.

It's enough that I won't walk into a wall, but not much more than that. I stop and turn back to my friends.

"Let's put hands on the shoulder of the person in front of you, and move as stealthily as we can. I don't want to have to fight in the dark, but it's a possibility. So let's be as sneaky as possible to avoid it." It's not much of a pep talk, but it's all I've got. Ash puts her hand on my shoulder, and I start walking again, moving as cautiously and quietly as I can. I slide my foot forward over the ground rather than lift it higher.

I'm hoping I'll kick any pressure plate we come across before I set it off, to at least give myself a little bit of warning. The next hour passes very slowly. Being all but blind makes movement difficult, and I know we're not traveling at the same pace we used to be. Amanda is probably gaining ground on us. She might have torches. Then again, she might not; she might be as stuck in the dark as the rest of us, trusting on her magic to get her through. Magic that still isn't working.

I do set off a trap, and end up with a bolt in my thigh. It only does 589 damage, but that wipes out all the healing I've done and brings my health lower than it was when we finished the last battle. I leave the bolt in, in case pulling it out causes bleed. I remember that much from first aid classes. When there is something stuck inside someone, like a crossbow bolt, it's best to leave the object inside. It acts as a bit of a plug, preventing too much blood from coming out.

Pulling the bolt out would open the wound wide, and I would probably start bleeding. Better to leave it in for now. We can pull it out when we set camp, when we can actually see. Until then, I'll grimace with each step, but I'll make it through. We come to the other end of the cave kind of suddenly. I've been walking almost blind, and it startles me when I can suddenly see again. We're outside. It's dark and cloudy, but I can see better than I could in the tunnel.

There's a cliff's edge about twenty feet in front of me. Standing on that edge, I can see that we're at least two thousand feet up. At the height we are, the world below doesn't look real. It's a strange thing about this kind of elevation. Your brain can't really comprehend the world being so far below you, so it just kind of assumes everything is like a toy version of it. There isn't much to do to tell how high you are; at this point, the brain just says "high." and moves on from there.

It's why falling from this kind of height feels like flying. The world won't seem to be getting any closer until you're too close for comfort. Before that, the brain just sees the world as still far away, and the distance doesn't change, despite the fact that gravity is making sure that distance gets smaller and smaller. I don't feel the urge to jump of the cliff. Sure, there's the little voice that always suggests it, but it's really easy to ignore.

I am only looking down to try to get an idea of just how much further up we have to go. Looking in that direction, I can see that the mountain disappears into cloud cover not too far away from where we already are. Another day of climbing, and we'll make it to the cloud layer. I wonder what is beyond it. It's very weird to be this close to the clouds. I can see them roiling around.

I feel like I can see the little specks of moisture that are being tumbled around inside the cloud, slowly gaining mass and freezing until eventually they fall out as snowflakes. Gigi comes and stands next to me, also looking up.

"It's weirdly beautiful," she says.

"I wonder what it will be like when we get above the clouds," I say.

"I wonder how thick they are," she says.

"Will it be hard getting through them?" I hadn't considered that. Are we going to have to fight in the middle of a cloud? Will it just be like a thick fog, or will it be something else, something more difficult?

"This mountain is trying to kill us," I whisper. She just nods. Then she pats me on the shoulder.

"We should keep moving," she says. I was thinking we should make camp, actually. We're on a flat plane for once. We could set up the tent and wait until dawn before we started up again. But we've been traveling in the dark for so long that it feels almost bright out, and I'm not tired. She's right; we should keep going. Maybe it won't matter, maybe we won't be able to catch up with Amanda. But maybe we will. And maybe it will matter.