Isr Kale's Journal (The Alchemist Book #4): LitRPG Series Page 3

  “And that’s pretty much it,” Valanil said, sighing in relief when she finished her story. She felt lighter despite the shocked faces around her, and she was even bathed in a white glow she hadn’t asked for. The god was confirming her story.

  Forian was the first to come to terms with his emotions as should have been expected given his status. As would have been the case for any mage in his position, his first reaction was to destroy the minion of Crobar. The disease couldn’t be allowed to spread. But his second was to curse himself for his weakness. He wasn’t some numskull investigator capable only of murder—the god hadn’t punished Valanil for revealing her secret, instead having mercy on her. It wasn’t for Forian to play judge when the real one had already handed down its verdict. Not guilty. And that meant taking the judgement at face value, something that actually wasn’t that difficult. He liked the new Valanil. Turning to a dumbstruck Tailyn, Forian piped up.

  “Student, how much longer are you going to keep us waiting? Were you able to figure out your problem? Can you do modifications, or are you trying to burn holes in your other mentor with your eyes? We all need protection from electricity.”

  The mage once again began undressing only for his chastened and blushing student to stop him.

  “Don’t worry about that. I don’t know about everyone else, but I can modify you without hurting you first. Valia, can you give me a hand?”

  “Sure.” The girl was having a hard time pulling her gaze away from her sister. Emotions washed over her, wave after wave, each different from the ones preceding it. After quelling the urge to batter away at Valanil with her fists, shouting as she did that it was all a lie, she suddenly wanted nothing more than to throw her arms around the other girl. Valia had always wanted a sister. Instead of the chasing and fighting games her brothers had roped her into, she would have had someone to play dolls with. Still, she’d never, not even in her worst nightmares, thought she’d get a sister like that, and with that kind of story about her father to boot.

  Running off into virtual reality was much simpler.

  “We need lightning,” Tailyn said. “Can you summon it?”

  Valia wiped away an unbidden tear and stretched her palms toward the sky. A moment later, storm clouds formed above the mountains, and a powerful bolt of lightning slammed into her hands, turning into a ball of sparks. Tailyn knew he wasn’t Valia. Holding the deadly element in his hands just wasn’t something he could do, instead focusing on imagining the ball lifting out of the girl’s grasp, separating into five parts, taking on a green sheen, and entering the statues. Despite the fact that the boy had pulled the sculptures off into reality with him, there was still an exact copy of the quintet there in the smithy. His chest warmed as the lightning flooded every corner of his body.

  You modified 5 players, adding resistance to electricity.

  You received immunity to electricity.

  “Why couldn’t you do that the last time?” Valanil asked as soon as Tailyn and Valia were back in the real world. Glancing over at her, Tailyn suddenly realized he had nothing to say about the enormous lie she’d been feeding him. That Valanil was dead and gone.

  “You should have said something about unification earlier,” he replied. “Here you are keeping secrets, and now you’re going to complain about how much it hurt.”

  After a short pause, the four humans suddenly broke into gales of laughter. The lix could only stare dubiously and shake his head, unsure why they would so inanely dispose of their emotions. Wasn’t it much simpler to let them build up until the next opponent they came across and make them regret ever being born? Just wasting them like that... But they were humans, after all, and that was all there was to say about that.

  “Okay, enough of that,” Forian said when he pulled himself together and wiped away the tears. “The subject is closed—Valanil’s one of us. Valia?”

  The girl thought for a moment before grinning and holding a hand out to the herbalist.

  “Sis?”

  “Sis.” Valanil took her hand and squeezed it.

  “Spare us the drama,” Forian said. “Now that we have protection, we need to decide what to do next.”

  “There really isn’t anything to decide,” Tailyn said. “Do you know what a destroyer is?”

  Judging by the pregnant silence and the shocked expressions on the faces of the erstwhile adults, they did, indeed. Tailyn projected his map onto the ground.

  “After I resurrected you, the emperor sent that thing after me. I can’t let you all get caught in the crossfire, so I need to get over here—the black lixes were taking mages to this city, so there’s probably a pool of that red acid there. It has to go. If we’re lucky, we’ll pull it off before the destroyer gets to me. And if the god is on our side, I’ll get a tear of Alron and some crystals. Valia knows what to do from there. But I’m not going to let that beast come here.”

  “You didn’t say a word about a destroyer,” Valanil said thoughtfully. “That means you have this as well as that impossible quest to return that book... And missions don’t reset when you die—I still have all of mine. I’m not even sure what to tell you. That monster is impossible to take out.”

  “It’s not a monster,” Forian said. “It’s a machine passed down from the ancients. From what we know, the emperor has just three of them, and he only uses them in the rarest of circumstances. The dean told me they haven’t been sent out in a few hundred years—there wasn’t a reason to. Yes, student of mine, you know how to get yourself into pickles.”

  “Although...” Valanil’s tone was still thoughtful. “The boy has the mission for the book. Remember what happened by Forian’s house? The god said it would kill anyone who kept Tailyn from getting to the library, so maybe that will work again this time. Tailyn can’t be killed until he delivers the book.”

  “No good,” Forian replied firmly. “That was the first thing that came to my mind, but it won’t work. Destroyers strip their kills of their entire inventory, so that thing will be able to deliver the book itself.”

  “You mean to tell me it has hacking or marauding up to at least level 65? My boy, when you get into something, you really get into it.”

  “But that’s not all,” Tailyn said quickly. All eyes turned toward him—even the lix doodling in the dirt with a stick perked up. What else did his master have up his sleeve? “While I’m busy with the destroyer, you all have a job to do.”

  Tailyn adjusted the map. A projection of Mean Truk appeared on the ground.

  “There’s an unusual cube here, something like what Ka-Do-Gir and I came across in the metro. Raptor couldn’t penetrate it. That’s pretty telling, so we need to dig down to it—that’ll take a week if you follow the optimum path I highlighted here. Maybe more.”

  “I’m not letting you go anywhere by yourself,” Valia announced. “Someone needs to be there to pick up your things.”

  “Sis is right,” Valanil said, and the younger girl twitched in surprise. Nobody had ever called her that—it was going to take a while to get used to. “You two should stick together so Valia can take whatever noa you’re able to create. That way, you can die, and we’ll resurrect you back here.”

  “Just so the destroyer heads this way to kill whoever resurrected Tailyn?” Forian asked. The thought wasn’t a pleasant one. “We’ll be on the run forever.”

  “We need to find someone to take the fall,” Ka-Do-Gir said. “We can pay them to die.”

  “That’s an option,” Valanil said, shooting an admiring glance at the lix. “There are always poor people willing to do whatever it takes to make sure their family is set for life.”

  “Why don’t we talk about that later?” Tailyn said with a shiver. Down in his stomach, a prickly feeling began creeping upward, and he had no desire to continue discussing that topic.

  Valia summoned her lizard and took a quick step backward. The animal was enormous. Its body hulking over the group, it stood there glancing placidly around. Suddenly, it jerked and
stared off in the distance.

  Go ahead, Tailyn heard Valia think, and the bulk dashed off, its head smashing into a giant boulder fifty meters from where the group was standing. As the boulder rolled away, the lizard’s maw reached into the hole it revealed to come up with a thick bundle of snakes. They were bitten in half a moment later. Oddly plopping down on its rear end, the lizard got to work swallowing the creatures, its front legs cramming them down its throat.

  “You’re supposed to feed it—that’s how it grows,” the girl said as though apologizing for her pet’s behavior. After gulping down the second mouthful of snakes, the happy lizard came back to its master for a reward, its neck dropped to hint at a scratch that Valia gave it. The creature wagged its tail like a happy oversized dog.

  “Ready? Okay, then jump on. There are two seats.”

  The girl leaped onto the lizard and motioned for Tailyn to join her. But when the boy got closer, the animal snorted warily and backed away.

  “It remembers you!” Valia said in surprise when she “heard” her companion’s voice. “The level the advisor worked Cloud up to is gone, but it still has its memory. It doesn’t want to carry you. At all!”

  “I’m not sure I really want to ride it, anyway.” Tailyn was staring dubiously at the bristling lizard. Sharp spikes had appeared where the second person was supposed to sit. “Wait a second—you called it Cloud?”

  “We have to call it something, and the advisor apparently didn’t worry much about that. Try and catch us!”

  With a light squeeze of Valia’s knees, Cloud dashed out of the city, putting space between it and its least favorite mage. Tailyn glanced over at their mentors before taking off after the girl. The time before, it had taken him almost twelve hours to get where they were going, only back then, Tailyn had been weak and didn’t know how to run. He could outrun quite a few animals in the shape he was in right then, though Valia’s new companion wasn’t one of them. The lizard constantly got so far ahead that the girl had to stop it and bring it back. Eventually, it started distracting itself by hunting anything it could find in its path, from little grasshoppers to a couple steppe wolves that had somehow survived those difficult times. Having escaped the lixes, the wolves just ended up falling prey to the insatiable lizard.

  But the real show started when Tailyn summoned his dragon. Seeing a new target, the lizard sprinted after it, and it didn’t immediately occur to Valia what her companion was up to. Li-Ho-Dun flew around the area without suspecting that anything was amiss, too busy enjoying nature, when the enormous monster appeared behind it. Mouth gaping, the lizard could already taste victory when Li-Ho-Dun realized the danger it was in. The lizard was fast, but it couldn’t match an actual dragon. Li-Ho-Dun ducked away, snarled, and hit back quickly. The stream of dragon flame easily ate through the lizard’s body to reach its brain, and Valia’s companion dissolved instantly. Thrown off its back, the girl’s head plowed a long furrow before she came to a stop. She jumped to her feet and stomped in rage.

  “Tailyn! Your dragon killed my lizard—I only have two charges left!”

  Neither the girl nor Tailyn had seen why their companions had gotten into a fight. Only the result was clear enough, and there wasn’t even anything in the logs. Li-Ho-Dun had apparently decided to fry the lizard out of nowhere. Summoning her companion once more, Valia was shocked when it saw the dragon and dashed off in the opposite direction. The girl had a hard time maintaining her perch atop it. Muttering in her head to Tailyn about the dragon scaring her poor baby, Valia rode away from the “mean boys” so intent on hurting little girls. Cloud was female from that moment on.

  Five hours later, the pair had arrived at the dead city. Deactivating the lizard was a funny process—its body folded into itself and turned into a slender belt that wrapped around Valia’s waist. And as the dragon had a tendency to stick its inquisitive nose where it didn’t belong, as well, it was also deactivated. The two children crept quickly toward the city, prepared for any unpleasantries it might have in store for them.

  But there were none to be found. The ancient stones looked as lifeless as ever.

  “Looks clear. I don’t see any tracks,” Valia said as she glanced around the ruins. “The lix camp was over there. Should we go check it out?”

  “Hold on.” Tailyn kept the girl from standing him. “Something’s off. Stay here—I need to check something out.”

  Nothing was coming up on Raptor, the area thirty-five meters around it clear of living creatures. But the boy’s perception was giving him an unsettled feeling as it traced a concealed path leading between the stones and gullies to the edge of the city. Without a moment’s doubt, he followed the line with an eye glued to Raptor. Nothing happened for a while. The boy was even starting to suspect that his paranoia was getting the better of him when a message suddenly popped up.

  Would you like to hack the 32nd element of the level 3 protective barrier? If you are unsuccessful, the owner will be informed of your attempt.

  “Tracks!” Tailyn exclaimed. “That’s what was bothering me—there aren’t any tracks. They should be everywhere, and the reason there aren’t any is because of the protective barrier. Should we hack it?”

  “Is that a rhetorical question?”

  “I have no idea. Level three has thirty defense, and that’s exactly how much my hacking gives me.”

  “Try it. If something happens, I’m right here. I’ll cover you.”

  Your Hacking level: 45.

  Probability of successful hack: 77%.

  Attempt 1… Successful!

  Tailyn was taken aback—how was his level that high? It took a quick dig through the logs to tell him that fifteen was from hacking, another fifteen was from enhancement, and the final fifteen was from device control. As it turned out, the latter skill also helped with hacking as long as the target was not a living creature. The additional 10% bonus from Raptor accounted for the rest.

  After deactivating that thirty-second element, the boy pressed himself even lower into the ground. A lix camp appeared, so big that Tailyn’s first thought was to get his hands on the generator capable of producing that kind of protective dome. Cages holding living humans lined the shimmering film, and the boy had to creep closer so Raptor could confirm what he saw. There were green lixes in the cages, too. Ka-Do-Gir’s tribesmen hadn’t been wiped out completely—they were there eking out a miserable existence as slaves of the red and black lixes.

  Nobody paid any attention to the fact that a section of the area was no longer shimmering. For the lixes and their prisoners, the protective dome was still keeping them safe from prying eyes and the bloodthirsty creatures populating the Gray Lands.

  Tailyn’s perception drew a new path over to the next protective element. The boy was forced to hack it, as well, opening up a larger view, though his scanner still couldn’t tell him how big the camp was. It didn’t even reach the tent in the middle. That told him the radius was more than a hundred meters, with the furry hulks of yaks visible on the other side. There looked to be about thirty of them.

  The people in the cages looked indifferent to their surroundings. Most of them were numericals, unknown and unneeded in the empire, though there were a few with names, also, their attributes revealing that they were from border cities. Unsurprisingly, Tailyn didn’t see any mages. They were presumably down below, either dead or suffering. There was no other fate awaiting the lixes’ prisoners.

  I’m following you, Valia said mentally. Tailyn crept forward and finally saw their first opponents. A squad of ten lixes was sitting around a fire roasting a yak—nine reds and one level forty-three brown shaman. From what Tailyn could tell, the old lix was the most dangerous in the group, none of the warriors exceeding level thirty. He spent some time craning his neck in every direction, but there were no other lixes to be seen. They were either in the tents or below the surface. Too far away for Raptor to reach, the way below was by the central tent, and even Tailyn’s perception had given up. It couldn’t
find a way to get over to the red tent without being seen.

  Got any ideas? Valia had crawled over to Tailyn and was eyeing the lixes.

  We need to take them out in one go so they don’t warn the others below us. There could be some serious characters down there. Also, the shaman probably has a hydra. Okay, I’ll block that one, and we’ll immediately hit the fighters. The five on the right are mine; you take the ones on the left. Oh, and keep an eye on that tent, please. They could have someone like an advisor there.