Ch 226 – Arne
Staring at the glowing jötunn in front of him without saying a word, the glowing jötunn could only scratch the back of his head awkwardly.
"Tough crowd," he said with a click of his tongue before shifting his weight between his feet.
"Well, uh," the glowing jötunn began before clearing his throat nervously, "our souls are touching right now," he said while gesturing between himself and Deacon before waving his hand slightly to draw Deacon's attention to the fact that he was also glowing with the same whitish aura.
"What the hell?" Deacon muttered to himself as he looked down at his splayed fingers and arms, then tracked his gaze down to his lower torso and legs, where they were also glowing with a faint white aura.
"Since our souls are intermingling with each other right now, we're able to glimpse into each other's surface thoughts and get a basic read on each other," the jötunn archer explained matter-of-factly. “How else would you explain us being able to talk to each other even though I’ve died long ago?”
"Oh, I forgot to mention this earlier," he began while straightening up slightly, "the name's Arne," he introduced himself properly.
"Eagle?" Deacon asked as his brain automatically translated the Jotnar word to English.
"Indeed," Arne smiled at the recognition before his expression shifted to a frown. "What does the word ‘Deacon’ mean, though? I don't think I've ever come across that word."
“Our souls do the translating by the way,” he said, raising his hand up to explain it before Deacon could ask. “You’re the third to find my relic.”
“They all failed by the way,” he said while leaning closer to him with a hand covered over his mouth conspiratorially.
"Messenger," Deacon answered simply. "My uncle said it was the name my mother gave me right after she gave birth to me."
"Not entirely sure why she chose it," he shrugged casually, "but it's my name."
"It is a good name," Arne nodded approvingly.
"Anyways," he said with a casual wave of his hand that caused their surrounding darkness to suddenly shift and change into the interior of a mine. An iron mine, Deacon surmised as he spotted chunks of the ore littering the floor, where scant few torches hung on rusted sconces attached to the rough stone walls, providing barely enough flickering light to illuminate the cave.
On the stone floor just a few feet away from where they stood was a person sprawled out with a large pile of rocks and rubble covering the entire lower half of his body, his pickaxe lying a good half foot away from his outstretched hand that had clearly been reaching for it.
Most notably, this person looked exactly like Arne, though without the whitish aura surrounding him.
"I take it this is you?" Deacon asked while turning to look at Arne standing beside him.
"Yes," Arne nodded while looking at his own dead body with a complicated expression on his face. "I hadn't eaten anything in over a week at this point, and was constantly on the receiving end of beatings and abuse from both the other enslaved miners who saw me as an easy target and the guards who wanted to ensure that I had absolutely no notion of wanting to fight back against them."
“And with what they did to my left arm…" Arne trailed off while his face scrunched up into a deep scowl.
"If you're skilled enough in healing magic, you can heal someone's body in such a way that you could sever the connection between nerves in parts of the body to the brain, rendering those parts completely paralyzed," Arne explained while still staring at his corpse. "A little trick the Head Guard who ran this mine used to ensure I couldn't fight back after he forced me down here when he found me unconscious after I'd fallen down a cliff and a river carried my body downstream near the mine entrance."
"Fight back?" Deacon asked while picking up on Arne’s words. "You didn’t sign a slave contract?"
"No, I never signed anything," Arne said with a complicated-looking smile crossing his face. "A jötunn is never meant to be a slave to anyone or anything," he said while looking momentarily lost in distant memories before visibly shaking himself and coming back to the present.
"Where was I—oh right, my dying wish," Arne said while turning his gaze away from the area around him to focus directly on Deacon.
"I want revenge," he stated simply.
"Revenge on what specifically?" Deacon asked while crossing his arms. "From what I read in the description of the relic you're inhabiting, it sounds like you have quite a lot of different people and things that would fit that category."
"The demonic boar for killing your parents, the bandits who brought the boar to your home in the first place, the guards and Head Guard who trapped you down here and permanently fucked up your arm, and the other slaves who kept beating and fucking with you," Deacon listed out while raising individual fingers and tapping each one with his other index finger. "Am I missing anything from that list?"
"No, you covered everything," Arne shook his head while sighing deeply through his nose. "You are entirely correct about all of those."
"What are the levels I'll be dealing with for each of these targets?" Deacon asked, seeing how his main question was answered. "The boar, the bandits, the guards, the other slaves, and what was your own level when you died?"
"The specific levels don't actually matter," Arne said with a slight shake of his head. "The System automatically adjusts everything so that all the enemies and targets will be on level par with whatever Floor you're currently on—Grunts, Elites, and the Final Boss—seeing as you're currently within a Tutorial Tower."
Nodding at the useful information, Deacon stopped as the last words that left Arne's mouth registered in his mind.
"Tutorial Tower?" he repeated slowly. "What do you mean by Tutorial Tower?"
"Yeah, Tutorial Tower," Arne answered casually. "While I might only be an echo of a soul at this point, I still do have some awareness of what happened to me after I agreed to █████████ ████████ ████████ in order to try and have my legacy preserved after my pathetic death."
"Wait, what did you just say?" Deacon asked while frowning at the strange noise in the middle of the sentence Arne was speaking. "You suddenly started saying weird static gibberish in the middle of your explanation."
Arne's face showed confusion for a brief moment before some sort of realization dawned on him, and he shook his head dismissively.
"If you couldn't hear what I said clearly, then that means you don't know enough about it yet to be allowed to know about it," Arne explained. "System Restriction and all."
Huh? Deacon thought in confusion. What the fuck does that mean?
"Don't worry about it too much, it's nothing you need to concern yourself with right now," Arne dismissed the topic with a wave of his hand. "All you need to know is that it's just System shenanigans doing System things."
Okay then... Deacon thought while deciding not to press the issue.
"So what exactly is a Tutorial Tower then?" Deacon asked while deciding to mentally shelf that topic for another day, as he currently had a quest to complete and was willing to accept that the System was doing some weird System-related things he didn't understand yet.
"A Tutorial Tower is a Tower created directly by the System itself and protected by the Floor Guardians, who also design the Floors within them. They are created for newly initiated races of a universe that had only recently been linked with the Multiverse," Arne began.
"But Tutorial Towers only last for around four hundred years before the System takes them away and everyone still within them gets dumped back out, because they were only ever meant to be a temporary training ground to help acclimate and prepare new denizens to become a part of the Multiverse."
And now I regret asking that question, Deacon thought to himself in annoyance as he now had even more questions about the Tower and the Multiverse that he was going to have to deal with eventually.
"Fuck it, I don't care about any of that anymore right now," Deacon mumbled to himself before looking directly at Arne and asking, "Whose stats do I have access to while I'm in here, yours or mine?"
"You'll have mine," Arne nodded in confirmation. "It would be whatever my stats were when I was Level 27."
"Which is quite unfortunate for you, honestly," he chuckled while looking slightly apologetic, "because from just a cursory scan of your soul, I can tell your stats were leagues better than my own in most attributes."
Ah, so it's gonna be like this, Deacon sighed internally while already beginning to somewhat regret his choice of relic.
"Okay, what about….?"
Deacon's eyes slowly cracked open to find himself lying face-down on cold stone with the entire lower half of his body buried under what felt like hundreds of pounds of rocks and rubble.
Oh, this is quite something, Deacon thought to himself as, despite a sudden waft of air blowing into the cavern that extinguished the only nearby torch and plunged everything into darkness, he could still see perfectly in the pitch black as though it were bright daylight.
He was able to clearly make out the contours of the stone walls, the many chunks of stone scattered across the floor, the ash from the extinguished torch, the tiny beetle and centipede-like insects scurrying away from him in fear of another collapse, and as he raised his right hand to his face, he could see it with incredible clarity.
Refocusing his attention back on his current physical situation, Deacon attempted to raise his left arm only to find it completely unresponsive to his commands.
The only part of his left side he was able to move at all was his left shoulder, which he could shift slightly.
"Drat," Deacon muttered aloud while hoping that somehow inhabiting Arne's body directly would have changed that condition, despite knowing it had been a fleeting hope at best.
Attempting to move his lower torso and legs next, Deacon was met with some limited success in that department — he could definitely feel his toes and could wiggle a few of them within the confines of his leather boots, though he couldn't actually move his legs at all from beneath the crushing weight of the rocks pinning them down.
Closing his eyes for a moment to focus inward, Deacon did a quick mental inventory of his current stats, which were actually Arne's stats at level 27, and couldn't help but sigh deeply in resignation at what he found.
It was a heavy downgrade on almost all of his physical stats except for Agility, which was slightly higher, while his Perception stat was just barely over what his own Endurance stat normally was, which, when compared to his normal Perception stat, was over a hundred stat points higher than usual.
"But my Strength stat is just barely over half of what I normally have, and my Vitality is less than half of what I had," Deacon scowled while doing the mental math. "Goddammit Arne... How hard is it to properly ratio your stat distribution when leveling? You could have at least tried to keep Vitality roughly the same as your Strength stat."
Letting out another deep sigh, something he'd realized he'd been doing quite frequently in the past few hours, Deacon closed his eyes for a moment and carefully examined the state of his soul.
"Okay, I still have access to all the spells I engraved onto my soul before I began climbing the Tower," Deacon muttered to himself while taking mental inventory, "except for Flame Art: Flame Steps, Blood Sense, and Ignis Sanguinis: BloodFlame Armament since I learned those afterwards during my climb."
"Which, while shit, I'd be able to cast them with a focus when I get my hands on one," Deacon reasoned to himself. “Though I’ll be needing to keep in mind Arne has an Earth Affinity.”
But without further ado, Deacon mused to himself as he carefully wrapped his will around Arne's Vital Energy, Stamina, and Mana running through the body and merged them together following a 1:2:1 ratio before activating Power Boost and pushing himself upwards, causing the piles of rocks atop his lower body, caused by the mine cave-in, to visibly tremble.