Burnout Reincarnation [SLOW BURN COZY 'MAGIC CRAFTING' KINGDOM BUILDING PROGRESSION] (LitRPG elements) [3 arcs done!]

The portal peered into the inky blackness, and Archmund wondered for a second if he was imagining things.

He didn't have the convenience of checking his Gemstone Tablet — he wanted to avoid showing its full capabilities in front of Rory, but Gemmy assured him that this was the right place.

Somehow, Beatrice was in this endless artificial night.

"Can you see anything?" Rory said. Archmund shook his head. He tried to light up the world with his Ruby of Energy, but the darkness was too deep and mystical for mundane light to pierce.

He shifted his vision to the flows of magic.

The world came to life, colored in resplendent brilliance.

They were between the stalactites, between the towers, yet now caught in night. Like a night-shrouded city turned upside down. There were plenty of platforms and bridges between the towers, yet they were narrow and few, even though they stretched on endlessly.

There was a floor, far below, but it was jutted with sharp spikes. It was so far down that the largest of the spikes looked the size of a pin, yet within it dark light danced, the natural rhythmic pulse of the Dungeon, dueling with the strangling light of the Omnio.

"Don't fall," Archmund said.

"That's ominous," Rory said.

Under his eye for magic, the darkness was less the black of Dungeon miasma and more purple, Beatrice's signature. When he waved his hand, it gathered upon to his Bodily Barrier for just a few seconds before being pulled away once more.

It almost looked like carbon. Pencil lead, or… coal.

"Do you have anything like a Bodily Barrier?" Archmund said.

"I think so? I can take a hit," Rory said.

"I'm not concerned about a hit," Archmund said, "I don't think we should breathe in this darkness."

Rory pulled his shirt over his face. It would have to do.

Beatrice, Archmund surmised, could see through her darkness, or sense through it in a way her brain interpreted as seeing. Perhaps she'd displaced the Dungeons' darkness with her own to attain night vision.

But that made things easier. Instead of having to search the whole place, they'd only have to search her domain.

"Do you think you can open the portal any closer to her?"

Archmund shook his head. "I sealed away most of the Dungeon's power, and I don't have enough of my own here. I only have enough to pick up all of us and then go back to Mary."

Rory grimaced, but accepted it.

The two of them stepped through the portal, and it sealed shut behind them.

Archmund knew there were all sorts of interesting algorithms that estimate the center of a diffusing mass based on its furthest reaches. He just didn't know any of them, which would have helped a lot here.

But Rory, it turned out, had an intuitive sense for the boundaries of Beatrice's power.

They just headed for the center based on his hunches.

They got an unpleasant surprise exactly once. A door opened on the side of the dangling towers, and two Undead Clerks stepped out to block their path.

Archmund shot the two in front of them with a Microwave, while Rory threw his staff in reflex and knocked the two behind them off the narrow ledge into the darkness below, his staff going with them.

"Um. That seems like a pretty big problem," Archmund said, as the staff shrank as it fell into the distant darkness.

Rory grinned. "I got some time to practice."

He stretched out his hand, and as fast as a whip the staff shot back into his open palm.

Archmund squinted. There was a disruption of the air that looked like it might have been a sonic boom… but no, it was probably a disruption to the magical field or whatever. Because the amount of speed and acceleration necessary to make a sonic boom would be…

He didn't want to do the calculation in his head.

"I wonder how Betty's been dealing with all this," Rory mused. "I got away with not meeting too many Monsters. But this place seems infested. Full of ambushes. Covered in darkness."

Archmund drew his Gemstone Rapier, just to be safe. It gleamed with golden light, barely enough for their path forward.

They entered a clearing.

"I'm sure Betty's here!" Rory said, a bit boisterously and loudly. The boy didn't have a great sense of indoor voice.

Archmund's sense of danger flared, and his Gemstone Rapier moved without his conscious urging.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

His blade slapped away something moving fast towards his throat.

It was a dinky little knife. A metal one. One that wouldn't have been able to cut through his Bodily Barrier had it hit.

"Come crawling to me?" crowed Beatrice's voice. "Have you finally accepted that maybe the Dungeon was driving you mad?"

"…Yeah."

God, it was as painful as vomiting to admit that.

"Wait, what?"

"Betty, can you lift this darkness?" Rory said. "It's kind of hard to talk to you when

"You're with him, too?" Beatrice said, though her voice sounded hurt. "He came to you first?"

"Is it that surprising?"

"No. But it's annoying. Are you still… y'know…"

"I'm under no one's control but my own."

"One second," Beatrice said. She drew the inky black cloud back, sucking it into her Gems. Now they were surrounded by entirely mundane darkness instead of chokingly dark mystical darkness.

Archmund sighed and used his Ruby of Energy as a nightlight. It worked now that Beatrice had drawn back her magic.

"That's… a lot of lanyards."

Beatrice was still shrouded in black mists, thick and billowing around her, like a cute and fluffy skirt suitable for a magical pretty fairy princess. It wasn't regal, it was fluffy and cute, which made sense because she was like ten.

But she'd "upgraded" her metal knife. She'd daisy-chained twenty lanyards together to make a rope, which she'd tied around the hilt of her knife.

"Using the lanyards was supposed to be my thing!" Rory said.

"It's yours if you're better than me with it," Beatrice said, smirking.

Archmund frowned. "How did you get them to bind together like that? How did you get them to bind with something mundane?"

"They're fused to a gem I set in the hilt," Beatrice said. "Now I don't have to run around like an idiot to stab things in the neck."

It was ingenious. His inventions had arose from his knowledge and his resources. She had wrought advantage from adversity.

"Speaking of," Rory said with a whistle, "that's a lot of Gemgear."

"I was constantly under attack out here," Beatrice said. "Was just catching my breath up here. This is nice, defensible terrain, kind of like Blackstone Keep."

"Were you hoping for us to save you?" Archmund asked.

Beatrice laughed bitterly. "I wasn't expecting anything from you at all."

Archmund swallowed harshly. He'd expected this from her.

"I apologize for my earlier behavior," he said.

She looked at him and raised an eyebrow. She wasn't going to make this easy for him.

"I apologize for diminishing your abilities," he said. "That setup is pretty impressive. You've done a lot while not having much."

Still no response.

"And I shouldn't have went on a rant about mayonnaise when you were hoping to be taken seriously—"

"I got your point about the damn mayonnaise!" Beatrice said.

"Right, you just didn't agree with it, which is why I'm apologizing."

Beatrice crossed her arms. "Do you really believe what you're saying, though? The only reason we're in this Dungeon right now is because you did all the work to make it safe enough for us to challenge. Without you as the linchpin, none of us come have made it here on our own."

Archmund grimaced. That hadn't been true, strictly speaking. The Omnio's perfidious betrayal had tamed this Dungeon enough to make bringing others his age into it not totally suicidal. He'd just been aware of a situation and taken advantage of it.

"I mean, that's what you told me," Beatrice said. "And it so happens that I had to agree. I looked at everything we'd won for ourselves, everything we'd 'earned', and it was all made possible by you holding back the stuff you thought was too dangerous for us."

"I never meant to—"

"You were better than us. You probably still are," Beatrice said. "But that doesn't mean I have to wait around like a lapdog hoping you'll give me a chance. If I see a chance, I'm going to try to take it. You can't get mad at that, can you?"

"No," Archmund said. "I'd do the same."

The lanyards coiled around Beatrice like a dancer's ribbon. "Glad we're on the same page, cousin. Now why are you here?"

Archmund swallowed. "I need your help."

Beatrice snorted. Then she burst into girlish giggles. A surprisingly innocent sound for someone who Archmund thought was as jaded as he was.

"You? Need our help? You sure you don't just need a distraction or a secondary defense?"

Alright, he deserved that one.

"You gave me that whole speech about how I wasn't in line with your mission and then you sounded like a Gem-addled madman. How do I know you won't pull the same?"

"I'm guessing you won't trust me out of the kindness of your heart?"

She blinked and genuinely seemed confused. Right. Jaded nobles. Manipulative parents. Et cetera.

"I need your powers to heal Mary. The longer she's stuck down here, the more likely she won't wake. You can repel the Dungeon's miasma. I'm betting you can draw it out of her spirit as well."

Beatrice looked at him. "I've never tried that before. I've never even thought of doing any sort of healing."

He stayed silent. In tense negotiations, silence would draw the other person to say their true thoughts.

"If I save her… her life? Her health?"

"Her health."

"Her health, then. That's lesser than a life, but it's not nothing. And you care for her deeply enough that I suspect one way or another she'll be family in a decade's time."

"So you'll help?"

He'd thought she'd be the hardest to convince.

"Getting to that. I want… a clearing of debts. "

As far as demands went, that wasn't so bad — unless she was counting something truly unreasonable as a debt.

"All the gear we've won, all the Gems you've given me, the training, you hosting me over the winter — all of that's free and clear. No taxes on anything I haul out of the Dungeon."

Archmund raised an eyebrow. "Just for yourself?"

She snorted. "Rory wants to be indebted to you. Gelias only took training and lodging, which can be paid back with a single favor."

"Hey!" Rory said. "That's not true, don't listen to her!"

Archmund listened to her.

"That might be more complicated than it is on its face," Archmund said. "The Gems are extremely high quality. Suspiciously so."

Beatrice nodded. "That's a very fair point. All of the garbage, useless Gems, then, and the ones you gave as a gift — those I want. The ones that will make the Omnio purge a whole bloodline, you can keep."

He didn't quite see how that would help her if the Omnio did come to that, since they were cousins, but he was glad to agree.

"So long as it's a full clearing of debts, from both ends. So, for example, you won't hold a grudge over me beating you so badly at that tournament."

"I mean, not a serious one. I won't hold it in my back pocket and get a duke to challenge you for my honor when we're at the Academy. But I won't let you forget it — we're family, aren't we?"

They were.

"In that case," Archmund said. "I think I can accept. But I'd want… a gesture of mutual goodwill."

"I can see where you're coming from," Beatrice said, her eyes narrowed, "but pardon me, cousin, if you think I'm going to just roll over for a less-than-fair arrangement."

"I'm hoping for something mutually beneficial," Archmund said. "I take all that extra coal off your hands, and you buy some excess crafts."

Her eyes remained narrowed. "There's something you're not telling me. And I have to wonder if you're looking for another pawn, or if this deal truly can be mutually beneficial."

She was quite clever.

Though if he thought about it, it would really not be great practice to poison the air of Granavale County with the smog of heavy industry, when Blackstone County already suffered from such high rates of black lung. The suffering of Beatrice's subjects would be an unfortunate externality to the advancement of the Empire and his place within.

"Those are details we can hash out once we're out of here," Archmund said. "But for now, I'm good to reset. At least for now. Can you trust me that much?"

The shadowed cloak around Beatrice bubbled and boiled, but after a long moment, she nodded.