Advent of Dragonfire [A LitRPG Adventure]

"So, you don't know what they took," Dovik says, looking at me with his arms crossed over his chest.

The open safe stands between us, illuminated by the overhead light. Just a few hours ago, he returned, more angry than I have ever seen him. He kicked a hole in the wall of his bedroom before I could get him to calm down. Then, I told him.

I told him about some of the things I have been keeping locked up, about the strangeness in how my soul works. I explained my theories, that somehow my emperor conflux does more than merely allow me to integrate any mana affix, that, for some reason, it is allowing me to create them. I told him about how I believe that these created affixes aren't original to me, at least I don't think so. Two of them have been identified by other sources: Warfire and Ruin. I have no idea what is happening, why I can do this, and sometimes, it scares me.

"No," I say. "I made them, and I stored them. The academy has equipment that can differentiate affixes. I was planning to use that when we finally began enrollment there to figure out what exactly I can make. It isn't something I can control or do on a whim. Maybe I never will be able to do that, but it is something I can time. The two kinds that I do have names for are dangerous, more so than any other affixes I have. I don't even know what the ones that were stolen could potentially be used for, or what they are called. The only real way I have to use my magic is through my fire, so if an affix doesn't work with dragonfire, then I have no clue what it can do."

"And those are the kinds that were stolen," he says, "the ones that you don't know what they do."

"No, not all of them." I take a deep breath, pushing myself to admit this.

Outside the window, the first rays of the morning are turning the black sky blue. Dovik waits, the anger gone from his eyes, replaced by a deadly serious expression. He doesn't push, but right now, he doesn't feel like my friend either. This is a glimpse of the professional magician, a man who grew up around dangerous people and things his entire life, and who understands how big a risk I am taking in explaining how my abilities work.

Arabella Willian once told me to always keep my abilities to myself, that magicians–especially higher rank ones–live for a long, long time, and that letting these things slip when you are still young is unwise. I didn't understand then how right she was, how good of advice that was. I am under no illusions about why those monsters targeted me, why they tried to isolate and kill me in Danfalla. They tried to kill me for the same reason they murdered a huge number of scouts throughout the different armies, because we could see them. I let that slip, and I almost died for it. So, I appreciate the seriousness that Dovik looks at me, his appreciation of what it means for me to tell him this.

"There was one," I begin when I work up the courage to say it out loud. "I don't have a name for it. The magic occurs when corrosion and cold align perfectly within my soul; it is a kind of mana I can use with my dragonfire. It makes pink flames, vibrant and dancing. At first, I didn't think the fire did anything, but it wasn't until I tested it on a monster when I was out on a hunt that I figured out how wrong I was. It kills, Dovik. That is all it does. The fire does nothing to anything that isn't alive; it won't even eat through a sheet of paper. When it contacts flesh, it eats it. The monster I used it against wasn't weak; it was in the mid second-rank, but a single ember of that fire was enough to do it in. Its scaled skin turned black, the muscle beneath shrank away and sucked to the bone. It didn't even scream as it died, just stared down at its withering limb with abject confusion even as its face began to shrivel up and its eyes shrank away.

"I haven't used it again since then. The corpse was so utterly destroyed that I couldn't disenchant it. Since then, I've been calling it Deadfire, but there has to be a real name for it that I just don't know. Whoever stole from us has four other unknown kinds of mana, including the deadfire. They could be benign; I have no idea, but they could also be worse. Far, far worse."

He doesn't say anything for a long moment and looks down at the now-empty safe. "I'm feeling like a poor friend, not realizing you had so many things happening," he finally says.

"What?"

"I have been a bit caught up in my own world." Dovik exhales through his nose. "Thank you for trusting me with this. I know it can't be easy. I know it's…vulnerable."

"I need to know what to do now," I tell him, the calm gone from my voice. "I have no idea what I am doing here. This was supposed to be easy. This was supposed to be safe. We go to a city, and we go to a school for a little while. It was supposed to be time to learn…to live. Now someone is out there with something dangerous, something that I made. If they do something with it, if they hurt someone with it, that will be on me. I have to tell someone about this, I have to…"

"Stop." Dovik holds up a hand, and I stop.

The guilt and shame come instantly. I thought that I had my heart under control. I thought that my grip on it had become iron while trapped in that coffin. It never did, did it? All it takes is one thing going wrong, and I feel like I am back with those blades. The phantom swords pierce me, their names uncertainty and power. They inch closer to my heart.

"What is it that you want?" Dovik asks me.

I don't answer him immediately, giving myself a beat to regain my calm. It is always easy to catch again once I realize I've lost it, like a ball tethered to my wrist. "I have told you," I say. "I want to kill those monsters."

"But right now," he says, jabbing the countertop with his index finger. "What is it that you want, right now?"

"I keep getting stabbed in the back." I say the words without giving them any thought. "I just want to stop, just to sit for a while. I thought that this was a nice place, maybe I could have that here. But this…I don't think I get to have that. Not ever."

"You deserve it," he lies. "We deserve it. After everything that has been taken." His voice becomes a snarl, and I know whose face he is picturing. "We can have that, if we want it. We will put this behind us, we will buy a better door, and we will move on with our lives. Money is going to be tight for a little while, but I'm sure we can manage."

"And the people who stole the mana and money?" I ask.

"We can forget about them. We beat a few of them to a pulp and left. I doubt they will come back for us. Let's just move on with our lives and put this all behind us."

"And if they hurt people with what they stole?"

"That isn't our problem," he says.

"I would be responsible."

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

"No, you wouldn't." His voice is stern, but I can hear the attempted kindness in it. "No, whatever they do with it is on them. It has nothing to do with us anymore. We will live here, we will attend classes, and maybe make a few friends while we are at it. We can have a quiet life, at least for a little while. We deserve that after everything."

I don't agree, but I can't bring myself to contradict him. It's wrong, but I am too tired to care. That probably makes me a bad person. I know that if someone used that magic to hurt the people I care about, I wouldn't think that the person who made it is blameless. We could contact the authorities, warn them about this, and potentially find ourselves locked up for having something that is illegal, for all I know. It is certainly dangerous enough to be illegal.

Looking at Dovik, at the anger, confusion, and exhaustion in his eyes, my will to pursue this any further breaks. In some ways, he has had it worse than me. He failed in Danfalla, not just himself, but the woman he is too afraid to admit that he loves. He deserves quiet more than I do.

"Okay," I say, running my hand over the broken safe and making it vanish. "We leave it where it lies."

He cracks a smile, a small one. He tries to be strong, and I love him for that. Yes, he deserves a year away from the murder and violence. I will make sure he has it.

"Something new?" Mato asks as I enter his store of incredibly expensive enchantments. "Or, are you actually going to buy something today?"

"Not at any of these prices," I say.

There is something pleasant about the man's open rudeness, something endearing. He doesn't display it with any of his other customers, though, I suppose I'm not much of a customer. I heft the wooden case in my hand, showing it off, and Mato drops off his chair behind the counter and walks toward the back room, beckoning me to follow.

When we have ourselves situated in the back, I crack open the case, showing off the seven infused mediums inside. The mediums themselves range in type: lead, platinum, spiderwire, and even a suspension of sodium hypochlorite. The last is my first experiment with using liquid mediums, something generally reserved for alchemists.

Even with only a few weeks of practical experience, Dovik was surprisingly helpful with creating the solvent. There is something in the way the liquid glows a soft peach color that makes it seem far more impressive than the bland wires and braids of cloth next to it. A part of me wonders if that contributes to why potions are so expensive, the fact that they glow pleasantly.

"Sixteen-hundred thaums of mana," I say, running my hand over the top of the infused mediums I display for him. "Give or take."

Mato huffs out air, looking over the mediums one after another without daring to reach out toward them. "You're an adventurer, right? I've worked with enough of them to know the type. Do you have some ability to track down monsters with rare mana types?"

I shrug. "If that would put your mind more at ease," I say.

He shakes his head, pointing at the braid of spiderwire and the glowing solution. "You bring a braid of rime and an infused solution of equilibrium into my shop and behave as if it is nothing. What are the other four?"

Galea floats at my side, invisible to all others, with a small window opened in front of her. As Mato declares the affixes of two of the mediums, she takes notes.

"Would you trust an amateur to identify them for you without verifying yourself?" I ask.

The man gruffs at me, and I give up on the smile entirely. "No," he admits. "I suppose I wouldn't."

Without needing to move from his stool, Mato retrieves his mana probe and attaches the end to the correct device. Running the probe across the surface of the various mediums, he continually checks the readout on the device, his frown deepening with every reading. Galea hovers at his side, jotting down the symbols the device displays in case I am unable to pick up what they are from the context of the upcoming conversation.

When he is done, Mato sighs, shaking his head once more. "I can't believe the league just lets you people enter the city without needing to go through any customs. You probably didn't pay any dues on any of this, did you? The mayor must be out of her mind to allow an apolitical organization of thugs and killers to have a back entrance into the city."

"I don't think anyone has ever called me a thug before," I say.

He stares at me for a long moment before putting away the probe. "I'll give you ten thousand suns for the lot," he says.

I laugh, utterly caught off guard by the offer. Then, buried instincts of a girl accustomed to attending open markets come to life once more. "You have to be insane. You think I am stupid, don't you?"

Mato balks. "Sure, they are rare, but what in three hells am I supposed to do with some of them. Chemic Pestilence and Rime are only good for weapons, and not many can afford the weapons I produce. I still have a pair of daggers that I made two decades ago, taking up space in a box somewhere."

Galea furiously scribbles away as he puts names to affixes I hadn't known before. I made sure not to bring any of the affixes that were stolen. Even if I desperately want to know what exactly they were, there is no chance I am going to risk anyone linking me to the thieves and whatever they decide to do with them.

"They will keep," I say with a shrug. "Are you really trying to tell me that you can't find a use for Equilibrium?" I ask, picking up the vial of glowing liquid. I see it in the way his shoulders tense as I heft it. He really wants this one. Lowball pricing into an immediate dismissal of the obvious value of an item usually meant that. I must have something very valuable here. For a moment, I think about tossing the vial to my other hand to see what kind of reaction that would cause, but knowing myself, I would just drop the damned thing.

Mato shrugs, trying to play off his obvious interest. "My enchantments don't require it," he says. "I'm not trying to make permanent arrays."

"This alone is easily worth fifteen thousand suns by itself," I say, motioning to the bottle. From the way his eyes narrow, I know that I undershot my estimate, and probably by a lot. Too late to go back on that now. "And you are trying to tell me that you have no use for this?" I replace the vial and pull free a cord of infused platinum.

"Elthapa's Breath," he says in almost a whisper. The name catches me up for a moment. Elthapa is the name of a goddess of some sort; I can't remember the particulars. "I'm not in the business of making ships."

"You could have fooled me with how expensive everything outside is," I say, replacing the mediums. "Well, if it isn't useful to you, I can always try somewhere else."

"You think I am unused to the haggle, little miss?" Mato asks as I start to close the case.

"No, but you obviously think that I am," I reply.

He waves me down before I can latch the lid closed. "Alright. You proved you're not a pushover. Take a seat and we will have a discussion like real enchanters. I don't need to know where you got these. In fact, it is likely better that you don't tell me. Then, when the authorities ask me about it after arresting you for smuggling illicit contraband, I can honestly say that I had no idea."

Using my black dust, I pull over a chair sitting off to the side of the room. The trick gets easier every time I try. It's no wonder that Arabella warned me that all the men at the third rank would try to impress me by levitating their weapons around. Moving things with a gesture is quite fun.

Mato and I speak for several minutes afterward. The man's ability to haggle is far better than any of the traders I am used to, and by the end of it, I know that I have been shortchanged a good deal. That is fine by me, and my smile is once more intact by the time I practically skip out of the shop, thirty thousand suns richer. It isn't enough money to get Dovik and me through the semester, not if we want to purchase fancy new equipment for ourselves after the robbery, but it is a good start.

Galea shows me the notes she took as I take the stairwell down, and it feels glorious to read over. Mato didn't buy the Rime or Chemich Pestillence affixes; he truly didn't seem to have a use for them. Even with the unfortunate setback of last night, I feel like I am finally making headway. I have a relatively safe place to live, once the new reinforced door is installed, that is. I have made it into the academy and have the funds to pay for me and Dovik's first semester, and I have finally begun to identify a part of the strange things that happen in my soul space. Things are looking better.

Fire + Cold = Equilibrium

Corrosion + Sky = Emerald Dawn

Steel + Corrosion = Temper

Cold + Growth = Rime

Corrosion + Growth = Chemic Pestillence

Sky + Steel = Elthapa's Breath

Steel + Strength = Indomitable