Explorer of Edregon

The first thing Vin did when he realized the battle was over was let out a sigh of relief. The second thing he did was fall to his knees, the sheer fatigue and exhaustion of so many different rampant emotions hitting him back to back finally taking their toll on him. Nearly dying in the first second of the fight and only being saved by Lumel sacrificing all her mana. Watching the ranker king annihilate Shia’s Living Giant and not knowing what happened to the Druid inside. Thinking Reginald had been killed, only to discover Scule had actually been killed. And then believing he was about to be forced to witness Alka cut down in front of him yet again, unable to do anything to help, just like the first time.

It had been a stressful couple of minutes.

“We did it, right?” Shia asked, limping over to them and frowning down at the ranker king’s severed head. “He’s not going to shout ‘Honor is Headless!’ and start trying to kill us again, right?”

“I think he’s down for the count,” Alka said, offering Epli a hand as the schlime flowed up her arm and withdrew into the cracks of her helm once more. Vin knew schlimes were nocturnal and didn’t much like the light, so it was no wonder Epli wanted to get out of the scorching desert sun. Even so, he heard its voice echo from within Alka’s head.

“Safe. Glad.”

“Thanks entirely to you, you ridiculous schlime,” Alka said, laughing as she tapped against her helm. “You just had to wait for a dramatic entrance, didn’t you?”

“Alka, your body!” Shia gasped, her eyes widening as she finally realized what Vin had noticed earlier. Alka’s golem form was chipped and cut open from head to toe, the ranker king’s incredible strength and his magical blade too much for even Alka’s nimble form to completely avoid. If anything, Vin was blown away that Alka had managed to avoid anything more serious than severe gashes here and there. If it had been him, he absolutely would have been down a few more limbs after barely a few seconds.

“Yeah…” Alka said, glancing down at herself. “Welp, let’s hope the librarian is interested in fixing this up too! Vin, you said Reginald was fine? He’s not dead?”

“What?!” Shia screamed, turning to stare at Vin in horror. “What happened?! Reginald managed to pour a healing potion down my throat and wake me up, did something happen to him while I was out?!”

“Sort of,” Vin said, motioning for them to leave the ranker king and follow him. “Here, we should do this sooner than later. I don’t know how long we actually have.”

Jogging over to Reginald, he spotted the rat carefully pouring a mana potion down Lumel’s throat, who jerked back to life with a sputter, coughing up the foul-tasting potion.

“Ugh…” Suddenly, no doubt remembering what had happened right before she lost consciousness, her eyes flew open. “Vin!” she shouted, scrambling to her feet and looking around as she held her head in her hands. “The ranker king! What happened?!”

“It’s alright, he’s been taken care of,” Vin said, giving her a reassuring smile. “After you saved half of us from getting cut down before we even knew what was happening, you ran out of mana and passed out. He was too powerful for Dimensional Lockdown to hold back.”

“Yeah, I remember that much,” she muttered, wincing as she closed her eyes. “It’s why I avoid that spell whenever possible. Too easy to burn up all my mana without intending to.”

“Scule managed to land a poisoned dart on the ranker king’s neck, which I can only assume was instrumental in our defeating him,” Vin explained, crouching down beside Scule’s still body. Only then did Shia and Lumel realize what had happened by the sound of their duel gasps. “Reginald actually managed to take the blow for him, but it turns out, Scule’s Magical Bond passive works for divine magic as well.”

“He stole the effects of Reginald’s divine boon?” Lumel asked, clearly shocked. “He gave his life up for Reginald’s?”

“It certainly looks that way,” Vin said, holding out his hand and casting Dimensional Sheath in order to retrieve the major artifact he’d been hiding in another dimension ever since they’d received it from the Relic Guardian in the citadel. The small, glowing gem landed in the palm of his hand, radiating magic like a mini nuclear reactor as he held it. It was so powerful that Vin couldn’t even look straight at the gem, as if being in near proximity with Scule’s dead body was causing the ambient mana within to ramp up and grow stronger.

“Maybe he was worried the gem would only work on someone with an actual class within the System. Or maybe he didn’t have any thought beyond saving Reginald’s life,” Vin admitted, leaning down and somehow knowing to place the gem directly upon Scule’s chest. He could all but hear the whispers from Manacraft as the swirling mana around them tried to communicate with him, to tell him its secrets and encourage the mana making up his body to throw off its Godly shackles and join them in true freedom. Shaking his head, he did his best to ignore the sensations. He still hadn’t hit level 50 yet, and the last thing they needed right now was for him to fall into another coma. “Regardless, one thing goes without saying,” he muttered, squeezing the gem and shattering it as if it were made of thin glass, letting the pieces explode around Scule’s tiny frame and start swirling around his body.

“You’re not dying on us yet, Scule.”

The ambient mana in the air was whipped up into a feeding frenzy, causing them all to stagger back as the storm grew larger and larger, transforming into a practical typhoon of magical might that roared around them. Despite his promise to the Goddess, Vin felt unable to tear his eyes away from the dancing mana in the air, his Beyond the Veil ability showing him how the mana hunted in a realm unseen, reaching for something that was slowly fading away. He could tell it wasn’t another dimension, but he had no idea where the mana was reaching. Even so, he stared with unblinking eyes as the mana seemed to pull a tiny, familiar soul out of nowhere, calmly dragging it back down as the storm slowly grew smaller and smaller. Eventually, the last dregs of mana seeped into Scule’s body, bringing the soul with it and somehow returning it to the flesh, almost like one imbuing a runic formation into an object that had been specially prepared.

Grand arcane discovery! 25,000 exp gained.

Level up! Adventurer of the Arcane lvl 48!

+3 Attribute points to spend.

+1 Skill point to spend.

Total Resistance increased to lvl 19! 3,800 exp gained.

“Ahhh crap,” Vin muttered, already feeling the world start to swim around him as Scule sat up with a gasp, the color returning to the petian’s face in an instant. But before Vin could pass out himself, there was one final pulse of mana that blasted out from the remains of the gem, washing over all of them and filling his chest with a foreign warmth unlike anything he’d ever experienced. Blinking, Vin stared down at himself in wonder. All the scrapes and bruises he’d accumulated over the last few minutes had been washed away, and he felt as if he’d just woken up and stepped out of his stronghold of slumber. To his amazement, even his mana had been topped off somehow, despite the fact that it had been below half mere seconds ago.

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“Broken branches, what was that?!” Shia asked, jerking backwards as she glanced down at her own body. Looking around, Vin realized she and Lumel had both been fully healed as well, and based on how Lumel wasn’t clutching her head anymore, now blinking in shock as she stared back at him, it seemed he hadn’t been the only one to receive a surprise wave of mana recovery.

“I think that might have been my Artifact Extraordinaire passive interacting with the gem of resurrection,” he said, realizing that was the only explanation. “The passive makes artifacts stronger, right? Well, it’s not like it could bring Scule back from the dead any harder than it already did. So I guess we all got a taste of the magic he benefited from.”

“I’m sorry, bring Scule back from the what now?” Scule asked, looking around at everyone’s surprised faces. “Did I seriously die? Why the hells aren’t you all crying?! There should be far more tears than this if I was dead!”

“Put a sock in it, pipsqueak, we knew you weren’t really gone so long as we used the gem,” Alka drawled, looking around at the rest of them. “Well, at least you all got a free touch up.”

Vin winced at the realization that, unsurprisingly, the wave of healing magic hadn’t done a single thing to her beat-up golem body. Scule went to complain some more, before Reginald tackled him and began rubbing his head all over Scule’s face.

“Alright, alright, I know, I’m sorry!” Scule laughed, hugging the rat in return and holding him close. “But hey, now you know why I was so mad at you for accepting that divine boon, right? See how it feels?”

Reginald gave him an apologetic squeak, nodding in understanding.

“Glad to hear. No more sacrificing ourselves for the other then,” Scule grunted, pushing himself to his feet. Flexing his fingers a bit, he hummed. “Wow, I sure feel great for someone who just died. I even got a cool new title for coming back from the dead! I don’t suppose that gem was reusable, was it?”

“No, it’s definitely gone,” Vin said, deciding not to mention the strange arcane discovery he’d made. The weird parallel he’d discovered between a living person’s soul and a regular old artifact would just freak people out, and it wasn’t like he could do anything with that knowledge anyway. “But hey, that’s what we had it for in the first place. It’s not like we wasted it.”

“Eh, we did have to use it on Scule,” Shia teased, grinning down at the frowning petian. “Maybe it was a little bit of a waste.”

“Why you tree-loving…”

Letting those two go at it, Vin walked back over to the ranker king’s corpse, staring down at the man’s severed head. Even in his last moments, the ranker king had had that freaky smile on his face, and the tears were only just now drying from the desert heat. It seemed whatever his weird interaction with the soul brand that he called the Thread of Ranks was, it had done a number on him mentally. Seeing the sunlight reflecting off something in the sand, Vin blinked as he realized the ranker king’s crimson blade was lying there. He wasn’t sure why he’d expected it to vanish back into the aether it had come from, but that didn’t seem to be the case.

A sword made entirely of magic, capable of cutting through other magic… It wasn’t the first sword he’d seen capable of slicing through magic. Dancing Leaf, Alka’s original petrified elderwood blade, had had a similar enchantment on it and could do much of the same. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something more about this blade than met the eye. His Beyond the Veil ability was practically screaming at him to give it a more thorough look, but he’d already toed the line once today with watching the gem of resurrection in action, and he managed to fight off the urge this time.

Picking up the sword, he was only mildly surprised to discover it didn’t have any actual weight to it. It was like he was holding an image of a sword rather than the real thing, and even the hilt didn’t quite feel real in his hands. Almost as if it were somehow made of pure mana given a form that was only as real as his focus willed it.

Lesser arcane discovery! 5,000 exp gained.

New artifact discovered!

“A full artifact as well,” he muttered, deciding he’d found his replacement for the gem of resurrection. With the gem gone, he had another open spot in his Dimensional Sheath just waiting to be filled. Why not fill it with the sword of the man who had travelled multiple fragments just to kill him? The ranker king’s original sword that had been thrown at him during his escape had been handed over to Phil, and he wasn't even sure what Lumel had done with the second one. But Vin didn’t think giving this one away was a very good idea.

After placing the sword in another dimension, Vin returned to his friends, who were all still laughing with one another as they came to terms with how close they’d all come to dying. Vin completely understood why John had predicted Terra would fall with his Doom Watch Capstone. If the ranker king had attacked while they’d all been scattered and distracted in the middle of fighting the battle for wave six?

Things would have gotten really ugly, really fast.

“I suppose we should go check and make sure Terra is still standing,” Vin said, interrupting everyone’s laughter. “Trust me, I want to go crawl into bed as much as the next person. But there’s a chance the battle for wave six is still going on. We should probably head over there as fast as we can.”

“Good point. That weird mana wave from the gem pretty much got rid of all my exhaustion too,” Shia said, giving them a pained grin as she held up what looked like little more than two broken branches partially twisted together. “…Though I’m sort of without my ride at the moment.”

“Is that Blossom?” Lumel asked, looking horrified at the remains of Shia’s staff.

“Yeah. My Druid of Bonds class ability lets me pass on any damage I would have taken to nearby plant life that has my mana imbued in it. That let me survive the ranker king’s crazy attack, but the only plant life with my mana in it was my Living Giant itself.”

“Which incorporates your staff,” Vin finished, staring at Blossom’s shattered wooden remains.

“Exactly. The good news is I’ll be able to restore Blossom in time, but it’s going to take me at least a couple of days at a bare minimum,” she explained, lovingly cradling the pieces of her staff in her arms like a child. “My master showed me how to repair it during one of our meetings, and Relationship Reflection will let me replay the memory as many times as I need to make sure I don’t mess anything up.”

“I’m filled up on mana again. If we head over to the dungeon, I can warp most of us through it and we can head back to town through the Underside,” Lumel offered.

“Let’s do it,” Vin nodded, looking at Alka. “Are you still good to fight?”

“Asking a Slayer that is liable to get you smacked,” Alka said, raising her sword despite the terrible state her body was in. “Come on, let’s not waste any more time!”

Pausing only long enough for Lumel to shove the ranker king’s corpse into her Dimensional Pocket, lest some wandering Necromancer stumbled upon it and decide to bring him back, the team ran off toward the desert fragment dungeon. Vin hadn’t actually been through this one yet, and according to his Dungeoneering skill, the dungeon was filled with monsters that looked like barbed frogs covered in cactus spines. Still, he didn’t have to personally deal with too many of those. After receiving his 5,000 experience for finding the dungeon and quickly wiping out a few just to satisfy his class' hunger for exploration, Lumel warped them straight to the Underside entrance, which they then ran through all the way back to Terra.

Stepping out of the forest dungeon that was free of monsters as usual after one of the monster waves, Vin was greeted by one of the most beautiful sights he’d ever seen.

A still-standing town, and half the leadership of Terra currently leading a group of what looked like roughly seven hundred confused Earthers across their fragment.

“That’s even more Earthers missing than the last wave,” Lumel muttered, taking his hand and giving it a concerned squeeze. “I guess that means we’ll be busy hunting for missing Earthers again for the next few days, huh?”

“Almost certainly,” he said, smiling as Alka caught up with them out of the dungeon, where she immediately began shouting insults at them for not waiting up once she realized the battle was already over. The fact that the number of Earthers being brought over was still diminishing with each wave meant that the Gods’ ritual was continuing to break down at an alarming rate, either due to the corruption of the old universe spreading faster than anticipated or the Gods’ hastily thrown-together ritual simply not being up to code. But either way, none of that mattered at the moment. Terra was in one piece, his friends were alive, and at this moment, Edregon was still standing. Sucking in a deep breath, Vin gave himself a few seconds to simply bask in the warmth of everything going right for once, before deciding that was enough of that.

“Well come on then, Worldwalkers,” he said, still unable to say the name without laughing at how silly the title was.

“Let’s get to work.”