The Ruins of Nephil were unlike anything I had ever seen. On this world, anyway. Back on Earth, these ancient ruins would have looked right at home in New York or Tokyo. If they weren’t completely deserted and reclaimed by nature, of course. The buildings were tall and modern in design, but time had extracted a hefty toll on them. The exterior concrete was crumbling. The windows were broken. Giant ivy with vines as thick as oak trees climbed up their sides and burrowed into their guts. The entire scene looked as though someone lifted two city blocks up out of Manhattan and dropped them at the base of a mountain.
As Scorch and I approached, it started to look more like the buildings were actually nestled into a carved-out nook in the side of the mountain. Rather than just being built up next to the mountain range, the whole compound was built right in…almost like a futuristic pueblo of sorts. It was a breathtaking scene.
“There’s no way we’re going to be able to explore all of this,” I said. “It’s only a couple of blocks wide from the look of it, but all of these structures are probably fifty to a hundred stories tall.”
“We should still have a look around, wouldn’t you say?” Scorch said from my shoulder. She’d wandered up for a better view as soon as the city was in our line of sight.
“I would say. Even if we don’t find anything useful in there, I am super curious as to why these buildings even exist in the first place. Have you ever seen anything like it?”
“Rocky, before we met I’d never seen a building at all. I’m a woodland creature, remember?”
I rubbed at the back of my neck.
“Yeah. Sorry about that. This whole talking stoat thing is kind of throwing me off, to be honest with you.”
I climbed a long flight of stairs that led up to an open plaza. The streets of the place were alien but still vaguely familiar, like walking through your hometown in a dream. Everything was recognizable but just slightly…off. There were no traffic lights or vehicles, for one thing. It looked as though the city had a small monorail system that wound its way through the buildings. To be clear, when I say through the buildings, that’s what I mean. The rail system didn’t weave between the skyscrapers. It penetrated them. The streets were primarily for foot traffic, from the looks of things. They felt more like extra wide sidewalks than actual roads. And they were clean. Maybe that was part of what was causing my unease in this place, being a guy who was used to the dirty streets of Brooklyn. The city must have been evacuated. Or maybe there was an extinction event of some sort. You’d think that would leave its mark on a city but there was not a speck of litter to be found anywhere. There was just rubble from centuries of rot and disuse.
I pulled up Environmental Mapping to see if there was anything nearby worth checking out. The nearest icon was off to the side of town, about 50 yards from the nearest building. I showed it to Scorch who somehow managed to shrug.
“I didn’t know you could do that,” I said.
“What?”
“Shrug your shoulders. How do you even know to do that?”
“I’ve watched you and the others for the past couple of weeks, now. Talking. Joking. The weird thing you do with Jasmine’s feet. I may be small, but I’m not stupid. You said it yourself, remember?”
“Ok, you and I are going to have a serious talk about boundaries.”
We walked until we were right on top of the icon set by my mapping ability. In front of us, there was a short set of stairs leading down into what appeared to be a bunker. I walked down the stairs and examined the metal vault doors that marked the entrance. I tried the handle. Locked.
“Looks like I get to practice lockpicking, today,” I said, cheerily. I had actually been waiting for an opportunity to do some breaking and entering. The stat card for the Rune-laden Burrow Grips I’d crafted back in the dungeon said that I’d get a boost to my lockpicking efficacy and I was excited to try them out. I opened my duster and set it on the ground. Scorch wiggled free of the jacket and shook her body a bit indignantly before settling in and sitting down to watch me work. I pulled out my Infiltration Kit and grabbed the trusty old pick I’d seen that lawyer guy use on YouTube about a thousand times. I slid one flat length of metal into the bottom of the mechanism and pressed against it lightly to keep pressure on the pins inside the lock. Then I got to work with a second rod with a small curve at one end. I tried pressing upward on the pins inside the lock and realized quickly that I’d fallen for the old “expert makes difficult things look easy” trick. I had no idea what I was doing. I was fumbling in the dark. I tried to jimmy the locking pins up in what felt like the correct sequence and tried to turn the mechanism. It moved maybe half an inch and then jammed. I had failed.
Vaguely, I heard a faint alarm sound in the distance. Probably unrelated. I would try again. I was focused. A familiar heat welled up behind my eyes. I could see the lock’s inner workings. The pins and springs. As I reset and put pressure on the lock by twisting my flat lever rod, one pin lit up. I pressed my second rod against it in an upward motion and felt a satisfying click. The lock moved ever so slightly under the constant pressure I kept on the lever. Another pin lit up. I pressed against it and it also clicked into place. I continued this process until I’d found the correct combination and the lock slid free. Giving the handle a turn, I laughed triumphantly as it spun free and the door opened just a crack.
A notification popped up informing me that my lockpicking skill had reached level 10, giving me another boost to my success rate and allowing me to pick more difficult locks. That was exciting. I was half tempted to become a cat burglar. But, I presumed there would be ample opportunity to pick locks while adventuring, so there was no need to buy a black turtleneck just yet. I opened the door the rest of the way and peered inside. The goddamn stoat was sitting there inside the doorway maybe 5 feet inside the inner hall.
“The fuck? How did you get in there??”
“There was a vent on the wall above the door. While you were busy playing, I decided I’d come inside and have a look around.”
“Practicing. Not playing.”
“Whatever,” she said. Then she did something that confused me: she started hissing at me. Her tail thrashed from side to side and thumped down hard on the ground behind her.
“Woah…wooooahhhh. Easy, now. What’s going on?” I said, raising my hands and taking a step backward. She didn’t reply. She just shot a fire attack at my head. I barely managed to lean sideways and dodge the attack. The fire sizzled past me and struck something solid just behind my head.
“Ice wraiths,” she hissed and bolted past me. I spun around to follow, my eyes falling on the creature she’d struck – a ghostly apparition that appeared to be coated in a thin sheet of ice. It was hovering in the air a foot or two away from me, wearing an expression of pure regret as its icy shell melted from Scorch’s attack. Its long, sharp ice claws dangled at its sides in helpless despair. I pulled up Environmental Mapping and nearly shat myself. There were close to fifty of the things surrounding the entrance to the bunker, and more were popping up every second. The wraith in front of me had melted through enough that the spirit inside leaked out and dispersed into the air like a puff of breath on a cold winter’s morning.
I ran up the stairs, pistol in hand and joined in the fray. Scorch was already laying waste to the unfortunate wraith swarm. Their thin ice shells were no match for the stoat’s fire attacks. There was no way I was going to let her hoard all the XP for herself so, much like Danny Devito, I started blasting. I leapt into the swarm, chopping at a wraith’s claws as it swiped at me, then firing a shot into its body at pointblank range. The ice shell shattered and the spirit was released. I smiled. This might actually be easier than I thought. I glanced at Environmental Mapping and saw that there didn’t appear to be any end to the swarm’s genesis. They just kept spawning.
Time to farm some levels, I thought. I was so close to level 20 I could almost taste it. The fight with the Crab Grass had put me right on the cusp of tipping over and I would be damned if a single ice wraith left this place alive before I accomplished that feat. Hell, I was quietly considering just staying there until I reached 25. I was fairly sure that there would be some sort of reward milestone at either 20 or 25, so it might be worth the grind. Ultimately, however, the flow of wraiths ebbed and eventually disappeared altogether. I didn’t know if that was due to the alarm having a time limit or if we’d just burned through the entire population. All I knew was that I’d run out of things to kill. I took a look at my UI to see how far I was able to progress from killing a few hundred wraiths.
After splitting the remaining free points equally between Charisma and Constitution, I waited for Scorch while she went over her own gains. Then, we continued down the bunker stairs.
“Wait,” I said. “I want to try something before we just wander inside this thing. We don’t know if it’s a dungeon or what and I want to be prepared.”
I activated my Crafting Kit and the table appeared before us. Scorch climbed up the rear leg of the table and curled up in a ball on top of the workspace. She watched as I laid my gun on the table and pulled out the Rune Weaver Codex. I had been studying it since Scorch found it for me in the dungeon and discovered it was more or less a beginner’s guide to rune casting. I’d been working on an idea for how to make the gun less deafening in enclosed spaces.
“I need a silencer,” I said. “My gun has been leveling up and doing more damage, but it’s still way too loud when I use it indoors.”
“Agreed,” she said, propping her head up on her forepaws as she watched me disassemble my weapon. I opened the Codex to The Rune of Laconism. From the book’s description, the Rune worked a lot like a silence spell in the old Earth tabletop games. It created a bubble of silence over an area to keep casters from hitting you with spells and things of that nature. I picked up the barrel of my gun from the disassembled parts and began inscribing the rune directly onto the side of it. Once that was almost done, I flipped through the book to another page I’d dog-eared.
The Rune of Diminution. The book said the rune could be used on almost anything, both living beings and inanimate objects alike. I was hoping that it could be applied to magical effects, as well. I began carving once more, combining and interweaving the runes. I was mostly working off instinct, to be honest. I didn’t see any reason why it shouldn’t work, though. So, as I closed the rune circles within one larger Rune of Binding, I began to look around my table’s inventory for the associated catalysts. The two runes had different requirements, so it was definitely a gamble trying to intertwine them like this. Especially on my first ever try at rune weaving. I had no idea what would happen if it failed. I could lose my handgun altogether. That would be…disastrous.
I finished carefully lining the runes with their associated catalysts and held the barrel out with a pair of tongs toward Scorch.
“Would you mind heating this up for a bit? I need the catalysts to melt into the runes.”
“Depends,” she said, yawning. “How much more of that Burrow Tyrant meat do you have left?”
“Plenty.”
The little extortionist set about the task of heating my gun barrel. It didn’t take long for the catalysts to set in place. Scorch stopped releasing her heat and I gave her a chunk of the promised Tyrant meat. I wasn’t sure, but I was starting to suspect that she gained a small bit of XP or something from consuming monster flesh. That was a discussion for later, though. As the catalysts cooled and solidified, the runes began to sparkle a bright purplish hue. Then, in a flash of brilliant effervescence, the marks burned into the weapon. A purple circle formed, large at first, then shrinking down so that its diameter was only slightly larger than that of the barrel. I smiled as the notifications arrived.
