Broken Lands

Sophia limped to the entrance and took a good look back the way they’d come. She didn’t see anything but the same lifeless corridors they’d walked through.

This probably wasn’t the safest place to rest, but at the same time it probably wasn’t the most dangerous. They’d just made a lot of noise, but nothing had arrived to investigate and it wasn’t the first time they’d made noise in the tunnels. On top of that, the moss monster had probably killed anything else dangerous that was nearby; it was unlikely there was a threat headed towards them from that direction either.

This might actually be a good place to rest. If nothing else, resting here would mean she didn’t have to make her way back to the sled on her decidedly unhappy knee.

With that, Sophia set her back to the casing that held the doorway and slid down to a seated position. She was close enough to the beacon that it could help her heal; other than that, all she had to do was keep an eye out for danger. She could do that and think about better ways to deal with another moss monster if she ran into one at the same time.

An hour or so later, Sophia realized that she was subconsciously maintaining the Imbuement of both Dav’s weapon and her own. She hadn’t had many maintained spells in the past, but when you did you didn’t drop them without meaning to; if you did, you were likely to be killed when something you expected to be there wasn’t. It was something she’d practiced for almost as long as she’d been learning magic, and the Imbue Blade ability was close enough that she’d kept it running without thinking about it.

That explained why her mana was so slow to return; she was using it. She could maintain the two spells and still have it recover, but it was very, very slow. Even with that, she was down roughly enough mana to perform the Imbuement twice. She suspected that a third maintained Imbuement would leave her with essentially no mana regeneration and a fourth would put her negative, but somewhere around there she wouldn’t be able to do much other than maintain the magic. It might be even worse than that if the imbued blades were actively being used; she hadn’t paid attention to the mana cost during the fight, but it made sense that it would be higher.

She decided to keep the dual Imbuements running for now. They were a little tiring, but they meant she wouldn’t have to perform them at the beginning of a fight, and if the fights were far enough apart she might even have full mana. She felt a bit silly for having dropped it in the first place, after doing her testing; if she’d done what she should have, she’d have had the ability already there when they saw the moss monster.

Sophia shook her head. Something about Dav caught her attention, and once she focused it was clear what it was. It was clear now that the odd growth or whatever it was around his eye hadn’t spread after all; instead, his skin glowed from within when he was hurt. It was probably because of his glowing purple blood, though Sophia wasn’t sure why that didn’t affect his skin color the rest of the time. Maybe it was like the way blood would rush to the site of an injury and swell the surrounding flesh? “Huh. You’re clearly healing; your face isn’t glowing purple anymore.”

“Bruising?” Dav sounded startled. He put his hand up to his cheek and tapped it. “That does feel a lot better. Talking hurts less, too.”

No wonder Dav hadn’t said anything in the past hour. Sophia probably wouldn’t have said much if talking hurt either; she certainly hadn’t moved her leg much.

With the reminder, Sophia tried bending her leg. It felt a lot better; apparently, Dav’s healing beacon worked wonders on soft tissue. She pushed herself to her feet. “I think your totem did a good job. How’s your mana doing?”

Dav shrugged. “No idea; it’s not on the display. I can’t even tell if the summon requires mana, though it says it does. I can say that I’ve only recovered one point of shield.”

Sophia took a quick glance at her own Status. It showed 5/10 for Shield, so she’d also recovered only one point. “Same here. I don’t think it’s considered healing. Maybe there’s another way to recover it faster for mana, but I think the healing beacon was the better choice even if you had the option. Something to think about for the future, but as long as we have enough time between fights it looks like it recovers on its own.”

“An hour for a point?” Dav sounded doubtful. “Are we going to have to wait ten hours between fights?”

Sophia shrugged. “Outside a dungeon or a war, it’s probably good enough. Inside a dungeon … well, I think we’re going to need a better way to recover or not fight things like the moss monster very often. We could probably take on a bunch of the bugs from that Shard now, though. They didn’t hit nearly as hard.”

Dav rubbed his hip but didn’t say anything.

“So, are you ready to keep going, or do you want to stop until your shield is back?” Sophia knew which one she’d prefer; she wanted to get out of here. She wouldn’t blame Dav if he wanted to be more cautious, however. The moss monster was a reminder that this place wasn’t like a dungeon. She couldn’t count on everything being as easy as the mechanical bugs.

Dav took a moment to stretch, then ran a hand over the part of his chest where he’d been clawed. “I don’t feel any pain, so I think it’s fully healed. We can keep going.”

Dav moved to the opposite end of the room, past the pile of moss that had once been a monster. Sophia was startled for a moment; she’d expected to have to convince him to check beyond the moss monster. It seemed at least somewhat likely that there wouldn’t be more monsters near it for a while, after all.

Once Sophia caught up with Dav, he moved forward. The tunnel continued to be covered in bits of moss and algae; there was even lichen on some of the rocks. Sophia was pretty certain she saw an insect with thin, sticklike legs and gossamer wings dart away from the pool of water as they neared it. It was a completely different environment from the dead tunnels they’d been in not too long before.

About twenty feet past the arch leading away from the moss monster, they came to another archway. When Sophia passed into the room and was finally able to really see it with her magelight, she stopped in dismay.

Her first impression of the room was green; the ancient stonework was even more covered in moss and algae than the previous room, the one the Devouring Moss monster formed itself from. Sophia relaxed a little when she came to the conclusion that this room’s moss didn’t seem to be actively inclined to eat her or Dav.

Water poured out of an archway that looked like a possible exit at the far end of the room. That was good, but it then flowed over a lip and onto a pair of stone platters that extended past the wall; they looked like they were originally designed as spouts to direct the water flow into the pit between that archway and the one Sophia stood in.

They weren’t going to be able to go any farther this way.

The room wasn’t actually a dead end. In fact, there was a narrow, if probably treacherous, ledge that led around the pit in the center of the room to two different archways, the one with water coming out of it across from the entrance and one to the left. The pit was the real problem; it was at least five feet deep, probably more, since Sophia couldn’t see the bottom through the collected algae and moss that covered the rocks and tinted the three pools of water in the pit a murky green.

At the far end of the pit, there was a third possible exit. It was not an exit Sophia wanted to try unless she had to; it was under the waterfall and was probably where the water exited the pit when the pit wasn’t full. The lower water level of the pit made Sophia wonder for a moment where the water they’d been walking through came from, but the answer should have been obvious, shouldn’t it? “No wonder the water didn’t really seem to be moving. In this direction, it isn’t. It’s leftover from a flood.”

“Hmm.” Dav sounded thoughtful. “And yet it was definitely moving back in the big cave. That should mean the water’s coming from the other direction. That’s clearly the route we should try.” He didn’t waste any more time looking at the room.

The sled was still where they’d left it, though the water level seemed a little higher on it. Sophia hoped that was just her nerves; she definitely didn’t want to be down here if the place flooded. They hadn’t seen a good place other than the big cave to get out of the water.

Dav grabbed the sled’s rope and started it moving. “How deep do you think we are?”

Sophia shook her head. “No way to tell. It’s cool, but that can happen in caves that aren’t all that deep or in caves that are really deep. The work that’s been done on it gives me hope that we’re not that far below ground.”

“Do you think it’s an aqueduct or a sewer?” Dav waved at the water beneath their feet. “I’m hoping it’s an aqueduct, myself; sewers are supposed to be pretty nasty and we haven’t seen any of that. I’d rather not.”

Sophia shook her head at that. He hadn’t thought it through. “If it’s an aqueduct, we’re headed the wrong way; people would be at the outflow so we’d want to head downstream instead of upstream. I still think this is the right way, though; we’re heading through an improved tunnel away from a cave that couldn’t be manmade. It wouldn’t make sense to make that cave for moving water around.”

“It was built up,” Dav argued back. “The floor was stone blocks, and…”

The discussion continued for hours. It changed from the way out of the cave to hobbies, family, and even movies they’d seen. The talk about movies was another big clue to Sophia about Dav; he’d never seen any of her favorite movies and she’d never heard of any of his. She was becoming more and more convinced that he was actually from somewhere other than Earth.

It was frustrating that she couldn’t come up with any way to tell where he was actually from, other than the name of the planet: he called it Dust. She wasn’t sure if it mattered whether he was from an undiscovered planet in her own universe or from another universe, but she would have been able to find out if she were at home. It might matter for getting home, at least if her suspicions were true.

They’d been thrown through the Origin and probably across universes when the bandits tried to destroy Cliff. That wasn’t a normal consequence of damaging or destroying a dungeon’s crystal, whether it was an individual instance or the main dungeon crystal. The only thing that was different, at least as far as Sophia knew, was Dav.

He had no idea what caused it. She’d asked.

Sophia sighed to herself and went back to listening to Dav describe the grand adventure of a commoner who was mistaken for the king and eventually grew into the role, rescuing his kingdom from a series of calamities along the way. It sounded like the plot of a comedy, but the way Dav told it made it sound far more epic than silly.