NOVEL NEXT Ch. 1
The Knighthood shall die with me.
Not because I would slay them. They were already dead, the useless lot, and I was the most useless of all. For I, Sir Henry Hildebraud of Mostenstein, was the last of the Knights of Saint Merin.
And I was about to die.
The mages were hot on my tail, a pair of them, shouting sufficiently correct incantations that made the air crackle and my knees regret every choice I’d made since sunrise. These snotty brats were nothing but overconfident little pyromancers who thought chasing a slime-drenched knight through a dungeon counted as personal development.
But it wasn’t like I could beat second-rate magic. I didn’t even have any magic!
“Why in the boiling guts of the First Paladin would mages be in a Tier I Slime Dungeon? The boons are never worth it.” I cursed as I turned the corner. Grave mistake.
The light barely reached past the bend, but I could already see the end. A proper, smug, unhelpful wall of slick stone, blackened with slime, and a shallow basin oozing at its lip like it was trying to weep. I had delved into enough slime dungeons to know this would very likely be a dead-end, and there would be no side tunnel, no overturned grate, no convenient rubble-heap to climb.
For a breath, I pictured myself spinning, ducking back the way I’d come, throwing my weight against the corridor and hoping the mages would trip over their own grandiosity. I even imagined slipping past them, the surprised gape on the apprentice’s face, the pyromancer’s cursing as his spell fizzled into the slime. It was glorious.
Then came a shout, “Seal the mouth! Don’t let him flank!”
It stripped the fantasy straight out of my head. Experience does funny things: it tells you what the danger expects you to do. The shout told me they’d set up the corridor like a spider web; it told me spells were likely waiting in the joints and snares in the shadows. They’d studied how preys run.
They weren’t here for the slimes. They knew I’d be here. I was the target.
I kept running, praying this tunnel wouldn’t be a dead end.
It was a dead end.
“Of course,” I spat, “By the bloated arse of Saint Merin, I’m meeting my end like this.”
I can’t die here, I thought. I’m supposed to carry the legacy of the Knighthood. If I die here, I won’t survive!
The torchlight from the corridor pressed closer. I had ten seconds; maybe less. My boots squelched as I turned, eyes darting across the basin chamber, searching for anything. A chest, a vent, even a loose stone. Saints, I’d settle for a rotting crate.
Nothing.
Of course. Even if there’d been anything worth taking, it would’ve been aether-infused, and aether was for mages. Not for me. The only reason I’d ever swing steel instead of spell was simple enough: I couldn’t make aether listen.
I saw something: a rock. It was only a flash at the corner of my eye, a cold wink of light where the basin rim met the shadow. Instinct did the rest. I lunged, closing my gauntlet on something hard and impossibly neat.
It was a chunk of quartz, not much larger than a fist, clear as a bell with veins like frozen lightning. I didn’t have time to study it before footsteps thundered in my ears.
Two shadows poured into the doorway, faces bright with the sort of hunger only mages get when treasure shows up and is about to be theirs.
“Easy there lads,” I spoke before I had a chance to think. “Surely we can talk this out between ourselves like gentlemen.”
The first one stumbled in, robes singed at the hem and patched with so many mismatched sigils he looked like he’d robbed a laundry instead of graduating from an academy. His staff was a broom handle tipped with copper wire and a trickle of glowstones, sputtering as if embarrassed to be seen. The second was worse. He wore a leather vest, his bare arms streaked with soot and dust, and a melting focus ring hung from his belt.
They weren’t even mages! They were hedge mages! That was why the incantations were only sufficiently correct and not correct-correct!
The first hedge mage split his hands and smiled the way a scoundrel would smile. “Sure. I have a deal for you. Hand over your silver armor, and we might let the rest of you out of here unscathed,” he said.
“What he said!” Said the second one.
For one ridiculous second I let myself believe it. They were only hedge mages, the lot. If they could read only half a spellbook, then I could take these two half-trained show-offs.
I hefted my sword like a proper idiot, chest puffed, gauntlet slick with slime. “Kindly yield! For I am Sir Henry—”
The first hedge mage sneered, spread his fingers, and spat out a Fireball that blistered the air. It hit my gauntlet like a brand. Heat screamed through metal into bone. My arm convulsed; the quartz in my palm sang and jumped. Reflex did the rest. I let go.
The rock and my sword went airborne together, an absurd, slow-motion duet.
The quartz hit my helm with a sound that was not a sound so much as a knock from inside a bell. Time hiccupped, then the world answered with a vibration that ran straight up through metal into my teeth and spine.
The rock struck like it had swallowed a hammer and trained it on my skull. My visor shivered; the joints sang. My ears filled with a long, single note, louder than the mages’ whoops and higher than the squeal of my armor.
How did it strike so hard?
Then light bloomed in front of me.
[CERALIS NODE CALIBRATION SYSTEM (β)]
Access Detected: Unauthorized User
Compatibility Mode Enabled
Legacy Protocol: Epoch 9
Clearance Level: Unregistered Knight-Class Residual
Initializing Mind-Link Interface…
Cognitive Pattern: [???]
Synchronization Error (98.7%) — Proceeding Anyway
Please remain conscious.
Everything flashed before my eyes in a second before fading away.
I gasped, eyes widening until the edges of my vision trembled. My shoulders involuntarily shuddered, and a jolt ran down my spine as if the world itself had sneezed.
What in the thrice-boiled entrails of Saint Merin was that?
Voices slotted into the ringing. They came at me thin and flat, tumbled through the vibration and came out dull at the edges, the way distant thunder sounds when you press a shell to your ear.
“Oi! If you ain’t gonna answer, we’re gonna blast you!” one of them barked, muffled and eager.
“Maybe fear got him. He’s probably pissing his armor right now,” another laughed in a voice thick with mirth.
“Eww! Can’t have him staining our spoils like that!” the first added, a wet, greedy chuckle.
Then another light flashed before my eyes:
[CHOOSE YOUR STARTING BOON]
Fleetborn’s Favor
Giantblood’s Vigor
Ravenlord’s Command
What? What are these floating letters? What do they even mean?
Something bright moved in the corner of my eye, and before my brain caught up, I was already ducking. A firebolt hurtled past my helm, close enough to scorch the air. Reflex took over. I swung my arm sideways as I dodged. Heat raked my cheek; the smell of burning slime filled my lungs.
[BOON SELECTED: Ravenlord’s Command]
Reward: +100 INT
What in the holy slop bucket of Saint Merin? Did I accidentally choose something? INT? What’s INT supposed to be?
The thoughts barely left me before the air sizzled again, and the hedge mages started laughing. One of them even said, “Did you see the way he dropped the sword like a little girl? Ha! Why bother holding it at all!”
I told myself INT must mean intelligence. It had to. Problem was, nothing about the world had rearranged itself the instant whatever was in front of me said so. My head still throbbed, my teeth still rang from that damn tone, and I felt no sudden flood of cleverness. If the boon worked at all, it hadn’t bothered to knock politely.
Still, if I had become any more intelligent, maybe I could talk my way out.
The mages closed in. The first hedge mage leaned forward, grin like a rusted coin. “Come on now, don’t make this harder for the three of us,” he said, voice oily as the slime rim.
It’s fine; I can handle this. The Knighthood has taught me to speak with chivalry and courtesy, and all shall pass. I forced my thoughts to comb through every parlor trick and diplomat’s turn of phrase I’d ever been taught. I rehearsed the soft, wheedling lines that would buy a second or two: Easy now, lads. Leave the armor be. It’s cursed and stinks with sweat. You don’t want another man’s sweat on you, no?
What came out of my mouth was not my voice.
The words left my throat low, slow, and lethal. “Lay a hand on me,” I said, “and I will carve you out of the world so cleanly the stones will forget your footprints.”
The effect was immediate. The first hedge-mage’s grin ratcheted tight and ugly; his hand, halfway to the focus ring at his hip, froze. The apprentice’s fingers twitched like a pup hearing thunder. “Damn, he’s meaner than I thought.”
“He’s bluffing,” the first mage stammered, voice high and brittle, trying to force bravado back into himself. “Like the cornered animal he is!”
What was that just now? Did that work?
I had another line ready in my head—soft, civil, the sort of thing that ended conflicts without blood or pride: Back away now, lads. No bad blood between us.
“Have you ever tasted your own blood?” I said. “Because I will show you, and you will learn what bad blood tastes like.”
What in the Saints did I just say?
The first hedge-mage’s face went white enough to steal the color from his singed robes; the apprentice’s fingers left his focus and curled uselessly at his side. For a beat they stood there, two men who had come for coins and found instead the kind of promise their childhoods had never prepared them for.
“That aura . . .” the apprentice yelped. “He cannot be bluffing. He lured us here to murder us!”
“Run!” the first mage yelled. The apprentices didn’t argue. They spun on their heels and fled, torches bobbing like frightened beasts. Their curses trailed away, panicked, then less panicked, then angered and slightly panicked.
The chamber stayed quiet long enough for me to hear my own pulse, that stupid, traitorous drummer. I stood there, palms sticky with slime and the quartz still humming against my helm, and tried to make sense of whatever had just happened.
Then the bright letters returned.
[BOON SELECTED: Ravenlord’s Command]
Reward: +100 INT
I stared at the word INT. It obviously worked. But whatever could it be?
INT (Intimidation):
Governs presence, threat projection, and the application of fear as a tool. Affects:
Verbal Coercion: spoken commands, threats, and whispers gain force; ordinary people (peasants, petty thieves, untrained brigands) will hesitate, flee, or obey on a failed morale check.
Aura Pressure: your presence imposes discomfort; weaker minds find concentration difficult in your immediate zone.
Social Rolls: replaces or augments checks where dominance, browbeating, or fright are relevant.
Duration & Scale: the bonus scales with exposure. Short phrases cause flinches and hesitation; longer, deliberate threats can rout groups.
[Your current INT: 104/100]
[Intimidation Overloaded.]
I read it twice, because a sane man reads anything that claims to explain miracles twice. Was my original INT 4? Did I really just become twenty six times more intimidating? How did this happen?
[Effect: Your presence exerts excessive aura pressure. Speech control compromised. Verbal articulation, tone, cadence, and intended subtlety are unpredictably altered. Risk of accidental coercion: HIGH.]
That was obviously undesirable. How could I remove INT points then?
Whatever apparition in front of me did not give me an answer for my question.
I ran the scene through my head again: the firebolt, the gauntlet singeing, the quartz slamming my helm, the ringing, the flash of words, the way my voice turned into a thing that made them flee. It played back like a badly edited memory, jump cuts and static, but the pattern was there: stone, strike, sound, screen, words, flight. Was it the rock?
I looked at the quartz properly for the first time.
It was not like any raw stone I’d ever seen stuffed into a squire’s pouch or sold by a crooked prospector. Ordinary quartz pretended to be honest; this thing hid its workmanship behind a kind of polite cruelty. Up close it was almost empty, like a core of absolute clarity, like someone had bored a clean eye through the middle of it, but inside that clarity something moved: a suggestion of current, as if a thin storm were trapped and pacing in a glass room. Veins ran through it in hairline forks, not mineral streaks but something that looked carved from light itself, branching sharp like frozen lightning.
“Who would make a rock like this?” I muttered. A divine prank? A thaumaturge’s leftover experiment? Whoever it was, they had power.
Was it really this rock, though? Could a lump of crystal, so small and quiet in my palm, have turned my voice into that . . . thing? The thought was absurd. And yet, absurd or not, I couldn’t bring myself to toss it aside. I didn’t understand the aether either, but the mages tossed it around like cosmic power trapped in soap bubbles.
My fingers tightened around it. It didn’t matter that I didn’t understand; it was mine, for now.