Explorer of Edregon

The next day began just like any other. Vin barely managed to win the war on sleep as he pulled himself free from a snoozing Lumel and went about his morning routine. He splashed water on his face, briefly contemplated fixing his wild hair before deciding against it, and brushed his teeth with some of Project Ark’s provided supplies. He’d been mocked by Alka and Scule for the habit, until Shia had surprised them all by revealing that the elves of the Sacred Forest actually did something similar with some herbs they grew. All in all, it was a fairly boring, mundane morning.

Right up until someone began pounding on the front door.

“Vin!” a familiar voice shouted as the pounding continued. “We need help!”

Startled out of his slow morning, Vin darted to the door, thankful of the fact that he’d at least pulled on a pair of pants. He was still shirtless, but there wasn’t time to worry about anything as irrelevant as propriety.

On Edregon, when someone shouted they needed help, they most likely needed help now.

“Tiffany?!” he asked, yanking open their door to reveal the merider crouching in front of him. “What’s wrong?!”

Only a few months ago, opening his front door to reveal a nearly eight-foot-tall spider person probably would have given him a heart attack. But now, all he saw was the distraught look on her face and how she wrung both her human hands and front spider legs together in worry.

“It’s Alka, something’s wrong!” she said, turning and motioning for him to get on her back. “We have to hurry!”

“What’s all the fuss?” Scule yawned, poking his head out of his room as Vin jumped on Tiffany’s back. It wasn’t the first time he’d written a merider, and he knew how to place his legs so they didn’t get tangled up with any of hers.

“Something’s up with Alka, tell the others!” he shouted as Tiffany took off, not bothering to wait for the others. As they sprinted across town with a speed only a merider and their many legs could match, he held on for dear life and shouted over the wind. “Tiffany, what happened?!”

“Alka was getting in some early morning practice with Trod and the old guard,” she said, using the term for the first six Slayers Alka had managed to make with her training program. “Tall Phil dared her that she couldn’t fight Trod with her head turned around backwards, and of course, Alka decided to prove him wrong. Somehow, she was actually winning, before she tried to showboat and started rapidly spinning her head around while fighting. Trod managed to land a direct hit which sent her flying back nearly twenty feet straight into a tree, and she went down.”

“Sounds like one hell of a punch,” Vin winced, thinking back to the giant orc that was almost entirely muscle. “Then what?”

“That’s it! She went down, and she didn’t get back up!” Tiffany cried, shooting past the gate guards who shouted something at them that was lost over the wind as they aimed for the dungeon. “Her eyes went out and she wasn’t moving. We thought she was playing some sort of prank at first, but a few minutes passed, and she still hasn’t moved! I ran off to get you in case you knew what was going on!”

“It’s not the first time this has happened,” he muttered, thinking back to the battle for wave five. After Alka had carved their way into the center of the epic monster, Vin had detonated over a hundred pounds of high-yield explosives, sooner than he’d thought he would have to. Alka hadn’t gotten clear of the blast zone in time, and the force of the explosion had shot her straight through part of Terra’s outer wall. When he’d found her, she’d been unresponsive, and it was only thanks to Epli jolting her back awake with her own mana that she’d woken up.

But if it had happened again…

Either Trod’s fist packs one hell of a punch, which is honestly quite possible, or maybe something broke in Alka when she took the brunt of that explosion. It was a hell of a lot of force. Even if her body is indestructible, maybe something inside her got misaligned?

Vin prayed nothing was permanently wrong with Alka as they entered the dungeon, and Tiffany quickly brought them over to the small crowd of Slayers wearing their distinct jet-black leathers. Vin recognized each of the old guard members, but he only really knew Tall Phil and Tiffany by name. Trod was still here as well, looking mildly concerned as he stared down at the unmoving golem. For the massive orc who generally didn’t do things like ‘expressions,’ mildly concerned was his equivalent of horrified.

“Tiffany, she’s bleeding out of her brain or something!” Tall Phil shouted as Vin hopped off her back. “Look! What the hell is that?!”

Vin followed Tall Phil’s finger, quickly spotting the slime oozing around the edges of Alka’s helm. Either Epli was trying to do something to help, or the schlime was trying to muster up the courage to come out and talk to the gathered Slayers. Vin knew it was remarkably shy, and he shushed the Slayers as they shouted at one another.

“Quiet!” he demanded, only a little surprised when all of them immediately stopped talking. “Epli, what happened? Is Alka alright?”

“Epli? Who is-”

Tiffany’s whisper was cut off as the schlime flowed out from under Alka’s helm, quickly gathering into a tiny version of Vin. The tiny him looked concerned, and Epli wrung his hands together.

“Unsure,” it said, pointing at Alka’s head. “Wrong.”

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“Yeah, I can see that,” Vin said, crouching down beside Alka. “Don’t worry, Alka, Tiffany ran and brought me back. Whatever’s wrong, I’m going to get it figured out.”

“You think she can hear you?” Tall Phil asked, moving a bit closer and blinking as Epli turned to look at him, instantly morphing into a smaller version of him instead. “Isn’t she, like… off right now?”

“Alka’s soul is bound to the golem,” Vin explained, laying a hand on her head and frowning at the cold metal. “She uses the golem to interact with the world, but she’s still in there. Right now, she’s probably freaking out at the fact that she can’t see or feel anything. It’s not the first time something like this has happened, and she told me it was unnerving as all hell.”

“If not first time, can you fix?” Trod asked, hiding his fist behind his back. “She said Trod could hit hard.”

“It’s not your fault, Trod, I know better than anyone Alka assumed herself invincible,” Vin said, giving the orc an apologetic smile. “As to if I can fix her… I don’t know. The last time this happened, Epli managed to jolt her awake again, but it seems like that’s not working this time. Something has to be wrong with her body.”

“But you can fix it, right?” Tiffany asked, fixing him with her six, unblinking spider eyes. “Alka always told us you can pretty much do anything, and to go to you if we needed something and she wasn’t available.”

Well gee, thanks for the heads up, Alka, he thought, rolling his eyes.

“I’m not some miracle worker, but I’ll see what I can do,” he promised, crossing his legs and taking a few deep breaths to calm down and prepare himself. “We are in a dungeon right now, so if you guys wouldn’t mind watching over us while I try something, I would appreciate it.”

As if the Slayers had only just then remembered where they were, they all snapped to attention, holding up their weapons as they spun around and took stock of their surroundings. Satisfied that he wouldn’t be interrupted, Vin took one final breath before closing his eyes and entering Introspection. Alka’s body was a conglomeration of different artifacts. If he could reach them…

Vin had to shield his eyes even within his own mana void as the countless lights blinded him, and he cursed as he realized the golem body was far beyond anything he could understand. Somehow, the many different pieces had all been linked into one whole, and he didn’t have the skill to separate one from the other. Drawing back, he decided to take a different approach.

“I don’t know if this is going to work, but Madam Trebella did say titles were weird things that did more than they said on the tin,” he muttered, focusing on his very first title that had been sitting around collecting dust for the past two months. Human Vessel was what had allowed him and Alka to share a body back in his early days on Edregon, but once she’d moved over to her golem body, the title hadn’t really had any purpose. He’d even had the option to replace it at one point, but he’d decided against it due to nostalgia and the fact that it was a rare growth title that he’d already upgraded from ‘minor’ to ‘lesser.’ Currently, Alka was bound to the golem, courtesy of Madam Trebella’s binding ritual. But if the golem was inert and she was trapped in there…

Vin had a feeling her soul would accept a hand reaching out to her.

Focusing on his title, Vin reached out once more toward the golem, focusing on finding Alka’s soul rather than the artifacts and the spells hidden within. It wasn’t something he’d ever done before, but he’d spent a few weeks running around Edregon with Alka’s soul anchored to his own.

He had a pretty solid understanding of what it felt like at this point.

After a few seconds, he felt something snag onto him, and he strained as he pulled it into his personal mana. For the first time, he saw Alka as she must have viewed herself, as a human woman stumbled into his void. As a ghost, Alka had been an ethereal, glowing green, so seeing her both solid and with regular skin tones was a tad jarring.

Introspection increased to lvl 20! 4,000 exp gained.

“What the hell?!” Alka shouted, looking around at the darkness before spotting him. Blinking, her brow furrowed. “Vin? Where am I? Something went wrong in the golem and I was trapped, but then I felt you reaching out to me.”

“You’re within my personal mana…” Vin explained, realizing Introspection might be a more confusing skill than he realized. “Though seeing as you’re here, maybe what we always thought of as our personal mana is something more complicated? Either way, I’m leaning on my Human Vessel title to chat. I can’t keep this up forever, though, it’s like you’ve got a rubber band connecting you to the golem that I’m pulling against and it’s taking a lot of focus to keep you here. It has to be because you’re still firmly bound to the golem, regardless of if it’s dead or not.”

“Well that’s just great,” Alka huffed, crossing her arms. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance you can fix it, can you?”

“Alka, I don’t even know what’s wrong with it!” he said, throwing up his hands in exasperation. “How many times has this happened? I know about the time during the battle for wave five, but are there others? Is this a recurring thing?”

Alka was silent for a few seconds, her face scrunched up as if deciding how much she wanted to tell him. Finally, she grunted and came clean.

“This is the third time… When that shark monster slammed into our lily pad raft and sent us all into the water, it hit me as well. I lost my connection to the golem, and when Epli jolted me awake again, I was already bound and unable to break free.”

“So that’s how a monster managed to get the better of you!” he said, punching a fist into his hand. “Okay, that’s good to know, but that’s not good, if you know what I mean. Once might be a fluke, or even twice, but three times? Something’s wrong with your golem, and it sounds like each time it happens it’s taking you longer to wake back up.”

“It’s only when I take heavy hits,” she argued. “I can just dodge them. Problem solved.”

Vin could only stare at her, wondering if maybe she had sustained a head injury after all. “Alka, have you met yourself? You’re always the first person to throw yourself head-first into danger. Don’t be an idiot.”

“Well, do you have a better idea?” she snapped. “Deorer made it quite clear my golem body was leagues beyond anything he was capable of understanding, and I know you haven’t become a master Artificer in the last few days. If you have a plan, by all means, let’s hear it.”

“I have one,” he said, feeling his heart start racing before the words even left his mouth. “Something I was planning on doing sooner or later anyway, but if you’re golem is broken, we might as well do it now.”

Alka froze, slowly letting her arms fall to her sides as she stared at him. “You don’t mean…”

“Oh yeah I do,” he said, nodding as he gulped.

“It’s time for us to head back to the library.”