System Lost: My Own Best Friend

"Alright, stay calm," Allison says, sounding the most panicked of any of us. "Don't make any sudden movements. We don't want to startle them."

"I wasn't planning on it," I mutter.

My words draw the attention of what I assume is the leader of the group—the one holding the sword to my throat. Right, they can't hear Allie or Maggie, but they can still hear me. He cocks his head at me, then turns to the woman going through our pouch and says something.

She looks up at him, then glances over to me and shrugs, responding in what sounds like an ambivalent manner, then returning to what she was doing.

"Her voice sounds pretty flat," Allison notes. "And she looks really tired."

The leader makes an odd gargling noise that I don't know how to interpret, then pulls the cloak off of us and steps back, flicking his blade upwards.

"Re'a'u."

I still have a hard time parsing out their words, but I think I can figure this one out from context. Keeping my hands in plain sight at all times, I slowly rise to my feet, taking the opportunity to look around. It's just the three of them as far as I can tell. The bowman is focused solely on us, the woman looks like she's taking stock of our things, and the leader is splitting his attention between us and the other two with him.

I don't see Nipper anywhere, which is very concerning.

"They're not afraid of us," Allie comments, out of nowhere.

"What makes you say that?"

"S'ape'ena'a," the goatman responds casually, still training the blade on me.

I smile weakly and shrug, which I hope he will understand as the universal sign for "I have no idea what you just said."

"The girl is barely even paying attention to us," Allie explains. "And even though he's got us at swordpoint, the leader is totally relaxed. I think he just told you to shut up, but he wasn't that firm about it."

I wish I could see even half of what she's saying, but I'll take her word for it.

"What about the bow guy?" I ask, trying to subvocalize as much as possible.

It doesn't work—the leader shoots me another look, but doesn't say anything.

"He's focused, but it's just concentration," Allie says. "Keeping a bow drawn like that is hard and he doesn't want to slip or hit his friends."

That makes sense, though it doesn't explain why. The last group was clearly scared, and when that tension snapped things got ugly fast. Are these ones just that much stronger, or do they have some other reason to be so relaxed?

"Your ability to read the room is great and all," Maggie drawls. "But how do we get out of this?"

"I'm not sure there's much we can do," Allison answers. "It would be nice if we had a way to communicate, but unless they start using those [Message] things, I think we're stuck with body language, and while it's similar I doubt we can rely on our standards of body language being the same."

Yeah. The last thing we need is to accidentally upset them with a rude gesture.

"And last time I tried to use a [Message] to communicate, it really pissed them off," Maggie adds.

"That might have had more to do with the content of the message, but yeah," Allie agrees. "Better to play it safe. Too bad there's no way to do it backwards."

"Hm," Maggie hums, but doesn't respond further.

By the time we finish that exchange, the woman digging through our stuff is finished with the pouches. The leader hands her the cloak, then gestures for us to step aside with his blade. I do so, and he approaches the pack we'd been using as a pillow, furrowing his brows.

Still keeping his blade leveled on us, he turns to the woman—who is inspecting one of the candles with wide-eyed wonder—and says something.

She grimaces and tears her eyes away from the candle to look at the pack. She stares at it for a second, her eyes moving as though she's reading something, then gasps. Her babbled response is impossible for me to follow except for one word spoken as a [Message].

[Embergaze Basilisk]

A rare subterranean reptile known for its ability to store and release thermal energy with its eyes.

"I like Laser Gecko better," Allie comments idly.

"[Laser Gecko]," Maggie mumbles.

[Laser Gecko]

A giant gecko that can shoot heat rays from its eyes.

"Heck yeah," Allison encourages her. "You tell 'em!"

The woman glances at me and narrows her eyes suddenly, but then returns her attention to the candle. Waving it around and babbling excitedly.

The leader just nods along disinterestedly, kneeling down to examine our makeshift pack. It is at this moment that Nipper decides to make his move, bursting out from behind the pack like a coiled spring and spraying the leader with a sustained blast of webbing.

The goat man quickly backs away, raising his sword defensively to catch most of Nipper's thread. At the same time, the bowman shifts his aim to the python-sized worm.

Nipper rears up and opens his lamprey maw to hiss silently at the stunned woman, and then time seems to slow down.

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I have to move. None of them are looking at me now, so I have one chance to make a move, and I have to make it count. I can almost see the future playing out before me.

If I do nothing, Nipper attacks the woman and the bowman kills Nipper. I can feel it in my gut—when that bow looses, whatever it's pointing at is absolutely dead.

There's no time to think. I have to cut the chain of events off at the source. First, I throw myself between Nipper and the woman, snatching the candle out of her hands. That's already enough to draw the bowman's attention back to me, but I just have to hope he doesn't decide to shoot, because Nipper isn't backing down yet.

With my heart pounding, I lunge forward and bring the candle down with all my strength—right onto Nipper's head.

"Bad Nipper!"

He flinches back and gives me a betrayed look, then sulks back to his nest behind the pack.

A rush of air right next to my head makes me jump as the arrow whizzes past and takes a few stray hairs along with it before burying itself down to the fletching in solid stone. I whirl around and throw my hands up, dropping the candle and then sinking down to my knees for good measure.

"Sorry!" I shout pointlessly. Squinting my eyes shut and waiting for their reaction.

After a long, tense moment, I crack one eye open to see all three goat people just staring at me as if I've grown a second head.

"Good call, Allie," Violet congratulates me.

"Wait, that was me?!" I ask incredulously, so surprised that I forget to moderate my voice in front of the goat people.

"I think it was...a bit of both of us?" Vi hedges. "Either way, it seems to have worked, somehow."

Indeed the three of them are slowly relaxing, exchanging a few words with each other and gesturing at me and Nipper.

"[A'a]," Maggie interjects randomly.

Uh, what?

[A'a]

The [Fa'aun] word for "No."

What?!

[Fa'aun]

An animal species. Individual specimens are almost always [Sapient].

"What?!" I say aloud this time. At least the [World Engine] isn't biased with the shade it throws.

"I think I've almost got it," Maggie mutters absently.

Once again, the woman in the group throws an odd glance our way, but is quickly drawn back into her argument with the other two.

"Maggie, what are you doing?" Violet asks. "Are you trying to reverse engineer their entire language using magical hyperlinks?"

"What? No, that's stupid," she says. "It would take forever to identify individual words and work out the grammatical structure. But for whatever reason [Messages] are a built-in part of the world, like a skill that Engie lets everyone access for free. I'm just trying to...flip...aha! I think I got it!"

A sudden spike of pressure explodes painfully behind my eyes, and the goat woman's words start to twist in my mind. The sounds I'm hearing don't change, but somehow the way my brain interprets them does.

"[—'d be talking to yourself too if all you had for company was some kind of worm—]" She stops suddenly and turns sharply towards me. "[Okay, I wasn't sure the first couple of times, but she definitely just did something.]"

The leader frowns and points his sword at me again. "[You! What skill did you just use?]"

"[She can't understand you, Draga,]" the woman sighs. "[Not unless you speak through the goddess. You do realize that the Fa'aun language isn't the only one, right?]"

Draga. That's the leader's name. It actually sounds more like "D'rag'a" in their language, but I'm not sure if the glottal stops are linguistically relevant, or just a product of their guttural voices. Wait, how do I know that stuff? No, more importantly—what the fricking heck?! Did Maggie just invent a translation spell?

"[I don't even know what we're arguing about,]" the bowman grumbles. "[We should just kill them both and be done with it.]"

"[She's a child, Saban!]" the woman retorts. "[She's no threat to us, and the anomalous creature could be important to understanding this new convergence. It seems docile enough after her rebuke.]"

"[Need I remind you, Miss Talla, that your cousin is dead?]" he fires back. "[Along with her entire bodyguard, including her husband who was stronger than any of us.]"

Aw crumbs, they were married? As if I needed a reason to feel even worse about that whole debacle.

"[Both of you be quiet,]" Draga commands them, not taking his eyes off of me as he steps forward, his sword once more pointed at my throat. "[You can understand us, can't you? You might look strange, but I saw the fear in your eyes when Saban mentioned killing you...and the guilt when he brought up Kiera.]"

Oh frick! Uh, okay, don't panic! This guy's really friggin' observant. The truth looks pretty bad, but lying is going to be even worse. They already think we killed the others—which is true—and they haven't killed us out of hand yet. My mouth feels dry and my hands are shaking. If I wasn't starving, I'd probably throw up. It's time to make the biggest gamble of my entire life.

I nod my head slowly.

Talla gasps, and Saban narrows his eyes, but Draga doesn't flinch in the slightest, just holding my gaze with his own cold expression.

"[Did you kill them? You or your worm thing?]" he demands, holding his blade steady.

Tears well up in my eyes. I'm scared beyond belief, but I force myself to nod anyway. Draga's grip tightens on his blade, and Saban goes to nock another arrow, but I don't just leave it at that. Maggie's spell has reminded me of something. The words in our head, the ones that the [World Engine] puts there, they aren't really words. They're ideas. Concepts. Even though I still hear them speaking in their warbly goat language, the translation spell uses the engine's [Messages] to capture their intentions for me to understand.

When Maggie overloaded the brute with her first message, it was because she put too much information into it. Our class, our identities, all of our experiences—it was too much. But I need these people to understand. I muster up everything I'm feeling. The fear, anguish, and frustration that I've experienced since arriving here. Maggie's trauma after being forced to kill people in a fight for her life. Violet's despair after learning that one of our assailants had been an adolescent. I pack all of those feelings up into a single word, and speak it into the mechanism of the world.

"[Sorry]." I take a shuddering breath as all three of them rock back like they've been physically struck, then add, "[Accident]."

Saban lowers his bow and Talla covers her mouth, her own eyes starting to water. Draga's expression doesn't change, but he does lower his sword. He sighs and shakes his head.

"[Blood and acid,]" he says, making it sound like a curse. "[If either of you expand that, I'll see you stripped of your commissions. I don't care how sorry she is, messages like that are the reason the protocol exists in the first place. As for you,]" he turns back to me and grimaces, running his free hand through the tangled fur between his horns. "[As much as I'd like to get an explanation, that doesn't seem possible. Damn it all. This job just got a lot more complicated.]"

With a resigned expression he turns away from me entirely, not the least bit concerned by whatever threat I might pose.

"[That's two anomalies outside the dungeon—three if you count a priestess and her entire entourage somehow managing to 'accidentally' get themselves killed by a tier one child right in front of a [Guardian],]" he announces. The other two look grim, if not surprised. "[Set up camp. I'm officially declaring this a convergence break and initiating an emergency delve. Talla, get a message back home in case we don't make it—use one of the tinctures if you have to.]"

The three of them get busy bustling about, setting up a campsite around me with surprising alacrity and an equally surprising lack of concern for all the bloodstains or the missing bodies of their companions. Didn't one of them say they were cousins?

"What...does any of that mean?" I ask myself quietly while they busy themselves around me.

"For the moment, I think it means we're not dead," Violet suggests.

"We take those," Maggie says in agreement.