NOVEL NEXT 82 - Looting A Corpse (Again)
They looted the Ghost's diamond corpse.
Archmund was the only one with experience to know that the loot wasn't that great.
"A diamond hand and its rotting skull and… that's about it," he muttered.
He didn't count the speckling of diamonds, most as small as particles of dust, the largest among them half a centimeter large in diameter.
The Ghost of Granavale had eaten its Gems, reincorporating their power back into its body, scattering that power through its form as that diamond dust.
Mary knelt and swept up the diamond dust, putting it in a leather pouch. She presented it to him.
"Young master."
She'd adopted a much more formal tone ever since the nobles had visited. He almost missed her sarcasm, how she would snark at him like they were friends despite the massive disparity in power between them, but he understood completely.
It was always awkward when noble and peasant blurred the lines between master and servant, especially in the wake of the Crylaxan Plague, which had made all social bonds much more liquid.
He dipped his hand in the pouch.
Despite their size — grains of sand — these were Gems. They could hold magic, even if that magic slipped out of them as quickly as it flowed in. Even though they had been extruded from the Monster's body as Gems before being reingested and reincorporated as part of its hide, they were more fluid and full of potential than Gemgear but more solidified and calcified than pure, raw Gems.
The power they held would come down to the creativity of the user. He could already imagine using them like a hundred microscopic knives to cut a foe to bits or as a fog so thick it stilled all motion. It was like the sci-fi concept of Utility Fog — in the far future a cloud of nanobots might cover a city, preventing all harms — if someone was getting stabbed, the nanobots would stop the knife. If someone was falling from a great height, the nanobots would turn into a cushion below. This was just like that.
Of course, that was his imagination — but he was already stretched thin with all of his other magical items, the potential of which he'd barely explored. Luckily, he had improved Mary's literacy, and she was naturally somewhat bright, and he trusted her a surprising amount.
"Why don't you hold on to these?"
Mary dropped her voice low. "Are you sure, young master?"
"We've already broken enough laws that result in capital punishment, so what's one more?" Archmund said. "You could pass these off as the Awakening of your handfan."
She still seemed unsure, but then she slipped the pouch of diamond sand into her pack.
"You're blatantly favoring her," Beatrice said. Archmund started. He hadn't heard her approach. She was talking about Mary as if she wasn't there. This, Archmund understood, was how nobles usually thought of The Help.
"Is that so wrong?" he said.
"I wouldn't have brought it up if it wasn't," she said. "We're nobles, Granavale. We have a duty to live for this country. Gem-blessed commoners have a duty to die for it."
"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori," Archmund said in Latin.
It is sweet and just to die for your country. This mentality had sent entire towns of English young men (and also young men from other countries, but the English were particularly traumatized by it to the point of memorializing it in poetry) to die in World War I. It had not paid off.
There was a sentiment, in his old world, that a thousand people as smart as Albert Einstein had died doing backbreaking lives in fields, their potentials unrealized.
"Does he do this often?" Beatrice said, glancing at Mary.
"Milady?"
"Act like a fucking weirdo. Drift into his own thoughts like this. Speak in tongues."
"That was Alexandrian, actually," Gelias said. He, too, had approached silently in an unpleasantly surprising way. "The sacred tongue of Alexander I."
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Because of course Alexander Omnio would name Latin after himself, just like how he'd named the empire, continent, and world after himself, and how he'd named the Platonic solids after himself. Of course.
"Well, it's not part of the poetic canon," Beatrice said uneasily as if suddenly struck with her own inadequacy. "I know the poems. I'm still working on the conversational parts."
There were more pressing matters at hand.
Rory joined them. At least Archmund saw him coming.
"Are you trying to goad my maidservant into being rude to me?"
"I mean she won't get in trouble with you for that, will she?"
"So the plan is to get her comfortable enough speaking freely until she one day slips up and insults you, and use that to what, get a favor out of me…?"
Even as he said it, he realized he sounded immensely paranoid.
"Granavale," Rory said, "That's a bit far—"
"How on earth did you guess that?" Beatrice said.
The worst part was that it was the kind of dogshit, landmine, selfishly-exploitative plan he would've come up with.
"Gotta say, Betty," Rory said. "You're being ornery."
"Yeah, yeah. You always say that. You can't stand a girl who can best you."
"You've never beaten me in a fight—"
"I will once my growth spurt comes in!"
"But it's like you've forgotten that my great-grandpa was… well, he started out as 'the Help.'"
Out of the corner of his eye, Archmund saw Mary make herself sparse. She busied herself with appraising the expanded entrance hall.
He moved to join her, and the three other nobles broke from their argument to follow him.
"How long did it take you guys to get to me, anyways?" Archmund said.
"Felt like ten minutes," Rory said. He'd been thrown all the way back to the beginning, but he'd been running the whole way.
Rory's path looked like it would have been straightforward. It was the same path they'd followed, just longer. They'd walked cautiously the first time they'd gone along it, but both he and Mary had ran after the Ghost had warped space around them.
"Five minutes?" Gelias said. He was probably just fast.
The part of the room where Gelias had been thrown had been transformed into jungle and marsh. The generic corporate foliage and palms had turned into a full-on rainforest, and insects chirped from within the thickets. The scent of tropical sap wafted over them, even from so far.
"Surprised you were so fast."
"It's in my blood," Gelias said. "In fact—"
"No time at all," Beatrice said, cutting Gelias off before he could no doubt launch into a lecture about his elven heritage. Her speed was a result of her shadow magic, probably, or her massive ego and need to lie for affirmation.
Her part of her room looked, from a distance, like bookshelves that had toppled over, leaning on each other, binders and policy documents spilling out of gaping caverns. And yet now that he knew their true scale, they looked more like gaping caves and sheets of stone like the volcanic mats and terraces of Yellowstone National Park.
The true scale was likely somewhere in between. The waterfall probably wasn't the scale of Niagara, and the caves probably weren't actually all that deep, nor the layers of rock so large. But he wasn't inclined to check.
"Is there anything worth collecting back there?" he said.
"I didn't see anything," Beatrice said. "You, Gelias?"
"The verdure perturbed me," Gelias said. "But it's nothing you would be concerned with. No Gems, no Gear, no artifacts."
"The verdure? Like, the plants?" Archmund asked.
"I would prefer," Gelias said, "not to delve deep into the details of my heritage at this moment. But yes, the plants."
"You can open up about your elven heritage when you feel more comfortable around me," Archmund said. "But why did they perturb you?"
"They're hollow," Gelias said. "And yet they're not. Wood bears a memory, one that my line can read and tap into. All wood does. You, of course, were more than bright enough to gather that over our winter training."
Gelias's powers seemed completely overpowered, to be frank, which suggested that Archmund didn't know about them. This had happened all the time to him. Once, he'd believed that computer science was the way to making a good living for himself, but then it turned out that web development and machine learning were worlds apart from each other yet both profitable in different ways.
"These trees, green as they are, hold only anger. In time, I could fight it and bend it to my whim. It would not be pleasant."
"That's about what I expected," Archmund said.
"…Huh?"
"Every other living thing down here is an angry ghost trying to kill us," Archmund said. "Why would the plants be any different?"
Gelias shuddered, looking up and down the jungle. "I would like to depart immediately."
"That bad?"
"You don't understand, Granavale. My magic is tainted with… whatever their essence is. I want no part of them!"
"Alright, alright, I get it," Archmund said. This, for Gelias, was probably like Archmund's [Rage of the Dead]. That oppressive force of anger and rage, driving you forward, and yet just pure emotion without control or intent so you couldn't distinguish it from yourself.
"So…" Rory said, "We going back? Or are we going…"
"Forward," Beatrice said. "We just started, really."
She was no worse for the wear from her mad scramble back to the fight. Archmund, for his part, wasn't too tired. He wanted to get some solitude so he could assess the current magic reserves in his Gems. The Princess Angelina's frequent admonishments echoed in his head: the Gemstone Tablet was a state secret.
Having a System Interface made you a target. He'd fought besides these guys, but the stakes weren't that high. As far as they knew, there were plenty of spoils in the Dungeon to go around.
He glanced over at Mary. She smirked at him before the other nobles could turn her way, and then dropped into a curtsy.
"We haven't touched the supplies you budgeted for this second phase at all, young master," she said. "We're more than prepared to go through the Tier 2, if it follows the same structure as the Tier 1."
That was a rough assumption to make, but they'd be able to turn back. Of that he was sure.
"Any objections?"
None.
"Then it's settled."
And so they stepped through the threshold that the Ghost of Granavale had guarded.