Book 2, Chapter 8: Alone, Once Again

Pain.

It was the first sensation Alen awoke to. A lot of it. He sat still, in the darkness, sand filling his vision. The pain was weak at first, a nibble in the corner of his mind. Then it slowly got stronger; more intense. It was like getting pinched now. Alen blinked into consciousness, and then the agony hit him like a truck.

He screamed.

Pain. A lot of it. Flooding his senses like a broken dam, coursing through his mind with the destructive impact of a tidal wave and the sticky persistence of honey and oil.

Moisture filled the corners of his eyes. What was happening!? Alen was suffocating. His lungs were burning as if he wasn’t breathing, even though he was hyperventilating like a wounded mongrel. Pained stutters left his mouth. His robe was bloody, and his head felt like it was hit by a hammer. There was a deafening ring in his ears. In his state, he was barely able to reach out to strand of hope that would give him solace. Mana coursed through his body, depleting less than a tenth of his supply as it completely enveloped his physique. Immediately, the pain numbed, piercing, pinching, nibbling… to almost nothing. He winced, wiping away the moisture flowing down his eyes as his spell took effect.

Numb Senses.

Alen looked around. Sand and a sky lathered in darkness. He was still strapped to his seat, and wood scraps surrounded his area. Above him was a slope, and a line of sand that had been pushed to the side. It seemed like he’d hit a sandy mound and skidded down, reducing the impact of the fall. The Galeboat was in pieces, the part that came off with him spread out all around the sand in fragments of varying sizes.

He looked up, and he saw the ground. The part his seat was attached to was flipped over, jutting out from the sand. Alen observed the area in silence before a stinging sensation returned. Numb Senses was wearing off. He used it again, taking off the portion of mana he’d regenerated. Finally, he slowly turned to look at his arm and paled. It had been impaled by a stray piece of wood, the jagged ends poking out from one end, and out the other. Even as his senses were numbed, blood continued to slowly drip to the ground. Alen’s lips trembled. He had to take it out.

His hand reached out towards the wood, grasping it. He was shaking. Sweat was on his brow. Why? He felt no pain, so why was he so afraid? Alen grit his teeth, letting out a miserable sound as he pulled it out in a single swift motion, taking dangling pieces of flesh out with it.

The pain pierced through his numbed senses, jolting him in his seat—a sharp sensation as painful as stubbing one’s toe. He felt his stomach churn. Alen saw the hanging pieces of bloodied flesh, along with the crimson stream flowing out of his bicep. Some splashed onto his face. He closed one eye, grunting as he unbuckled the seatbelt. He fell. His blood splattered over the sand. He hurriedly limped off, looking around for his bag. It was nowhere to be found. His bone pouch was missing too. His bloody right hand grabbed the cloth of his robe on his injured left arm and pulled. It tore, and he used it as a makeshift bandage. Blood continued to drip, but it would stop eventually. Alen felt lightheaded. He opened his status.

Status:

Name: Alen

Race: Human

Type: Necrotic

Health: 28%

Stamina: 21%

Mana: 93%

Strength: 15

Dexterity: 16

Agility: 14

Constitution: 17

Vitality: 12

Resistance: 15

Intelligence: 27 (++)

Wisdom: 35 (+++)

Control: 32 (+)

Skills:

Mana Programming, Dominate Undead, Blightbolt, Necrotic Blessing, Numb Senses, Summon Skeletal Minion, Rotfire Blast, Deathchill Touch, Bone Spear

System Applications:

AutoBone

He frowned. His health wasn’t as bad as he thought, but it was in a pretty dire state. If it worked anything like his mana, he would start passing out at anywhere between ten and five percent. Blood loss would probably lower it further, and the lightheaded feeling he was getting did not feel like a good sign. Alen stared at the stat increases. They had increased by more than the usual. Wisdom went up by a good six points, Intelligence five points, and Control four points. Most of his other stats gone up by two instead of one as well. Rotfire Bolt had changed to Rotfire Blast too. Alen suspected this was probably due to the increase to his Intelligence stat, along with the culminated adjustments he’d made to the spell over the past month.

Alen hoped that the points in Constitution and Vitality would help fix the wound on his arm faster. He looked around. Not much to the area. He was in some sort of canyon, almost large enough to be considered a valley of sorts, but he couldn’t make out much else because it was night time.

He licked his parched lips, allocating another small portion of his mana to keep Numb Senses in effect. By the way his left arm hung limply, Alen guessed that a simple stab wasn’t his only problem. It could be broken, or his shoulder could be dislocated. He considered letting go of Numb Sense’s effect to check, but he decided against it. He didn’t want to feel that pain again. It was… terrifying. He’d never known pain of that level until today, and he never wanted to experience it again.

With a small rustle, he limped forward. His shoes almost dragging against the sand.

Carelessness couldn’t be tolerated here, Alen knew. He made sure to make use of shadows as cover, staying away from the moonlight that flowed from the sky. Monsters could be anywhere in the Sandsea, and they were especially attracted to bite-sized people-flavored morsels like him. He closed his fist, looking at his tattered robes. He had no bone shards left, and his pouch and bag were missing. The only thing he had left was his watch, which he still refused to take off, and his closest, dearest companion. His phone that was nestled in his pocket. It was all cracked now, and the screen would sometimes bug out, but it was thankfully still functional.

Alen mentally promised the phone he would take better care of it. He walked for about two hours, before he encountered the canyon’s first sign of life. He hid behind a rock, his repressed breaths sounding all too loud as he glanced at the creature in front of him.

It was a massive sand viper, one of the many that gathered around the Sandsea. He’d encountered one before with Roland and Lynn, and it was taken care of easily thanks to Roland’s shockwave-based attacks that bypassed the defense of its powerful scales. Alen felt all too vulnerable without his bone pouch, and he erased all thoughts of getting even ten meters near that giant slithering mass of excessively tanky shit.

The snake slipped into a large gap within the canyon wall, looking for any insect monsters to eat. He waited for a few minutes.

Alen let out a relieved sigh and slowly walked off from his hiding spot, carefully walking past the gap the snake had disappeared into. He wasn’t looking forward to meeting that thing again any time soon. He glanced at his mana pool. Numb senses was taking quite the amount, but he could manage with his current regen rate. His mana was perpetually hovering over eighty percent. The wound in his left arm was swelling, but it had stopped bleeding at the very least. Alen hoped his stats would fix his presumably broken arm. He didn’t want to end up as a cripple. Finally, he found a small gap in the canyon wall and crawled into it, making sure nothing was going to jump out at him.

He sat down and bumped the back of his head against the wall, letting out an exasperated sigh. He opened up his status again, and opened up his party chat with Lynn and Roland. He pressed the button and sent a voice message. He waited. Nothing.

Lynn mentioned before that it would stop working after a certain distance, but he recalled that distance to be quite large, meaning he was a long ways away from his party.

“Well, it’s decided. I’m fucked,” He muttered, looking dejectedly at his injured arm. He still couldn’t move it. Alen’s finger hovered over the chat room his friends were in, but before he could press it, he was suddenly submerged thousands of meters into the ocean. A freezing sensation caused the hairs in his body to stand up, and his lungs forgot how to breathe. A terrible pressure assaulted him from all directions, as if trying to compress him into a tiny speck.

Alen looked out of the hole leading out of his hiding spot. He wasn’t under the ocean, no. This was… the pressure of being near a being leagues above yourself. He’d felt it before, when he’d met Alexandrius. This was different. It was crushing, domineering, a whole level of terror assaulting every cell in his body and telling him to run. He couldn’t run. He couldn’t move. His body felt like it wanted to shut down and die, simply to avoid the experience of meeting whatever was outside.

Slowly, the pressure intensified, and the world outside trembled. Alen saw scales slither past his hiding spot, each one as large as his own body.

Finally, it paused. It moved down, and a humongous yellow eye peered into the darkness of his hiding spot. Slitted, its pupils pierced through the darkness to stare straight at him. He trembled uncontrollably, staring straight into the glowing yellow orb that was gazing back at him. His entire body was sweating profusely; a shaking, terrified mess.

After what seemed like an eternity, the eyes disappeared—the owner deciding that a petty creature like himself wasn’t worth the effort. Finally, the creature slithered away, its scales disappearing from sight.

Alen collapsed against the wall, gasping for breath and feeling like he was about to pass out. He looked fearfully at the outside, the familiar feeling of fear entering his heart. It got stronger, until the scar in his palm burned with pain, as if to remind him of something. Alen gripped his fist so hard his knuckles turned white. He suppressed the fear. Not again. He would not come back to that miserable state a second time.

What the hell was that thing? He shuddered, shivering at the cold sweat lining his back. This place was definitely not normal, he concurred. He had to be extra careful from now on, lest he leave this place as a pile of dung after being eaten alive by some monster.

He let out a breath, forcing a smile onto his face as he recalled old jokes. He had to stay rooted. Rooted. Grasping at the straws of juvenile humor in his head, he laughed to keep his feet on the ground. It was slightly forced, but it was good enough. Alen felt the weight in his chest drain out, replaced by a shallow emptiness as he stared outside.

“Back to square one,” He mumbled. Just when he’d finally found companions, he got separated from them. How the hell was he supposed to find them now? Worst of all, he had no teeth or shards to defend himself with, while his mana was constantly at eighty percent due to his efforts in keeping up Numb Senses. Alen winced at the sight of his bicep. There was no way he could go to sleep and maintain Numb Senses at the same time. He stood up, peeking out at the branching paths of the canyon outside.

One route was messy, the rocks and sand disturbed by a massive creature. Alen immediately ruled it out. Three more were presented to him. The gap the viper had crawled into a while ago, forward, or back to where he came from.

Alen debated with himself for a moment before deciding to head forward. Nothing but a wreck was waiting for him, and his staff was most likely not anywhere near the wreck. He’d done a cursory check a while ago, and found that it had been blown away with his bag and bone pouch. Cuck was nowhere to be found either, but Alen felt the connection was still present. The little bone chicken wasn’t close enough for him to be able to command it, but the necromancer hoped that it was at least in the general area. Cuck could be his equivalent of Wilson, and more importantly, a new supply of bones. It would be easy to regenerate a few spare shards if he managed to find his first summon.

He creeped forward once again, recalling the advice Sam once gave him. He’d tested it before with Rotfire and Deathchill; the fact that he wasn’t limited to a single type of mana. The difference now however, was that he had to conjure some without mixing in Necrotic mana.

The mana inside his body was pure, and he simply had to select the correct flavor of mana-mix to throw in. The problem was, some bits of necrotic flavoring would occasionally mix in, so he had to filter it out first. Alen concentrated, the feeling of manipulating mana without a program causing him to furrow his brow. Inside of him, his mind slowly removed the necrotic mana inside the other ‘flavors’ of what he was now calling mana-mix as he walked. Eventually, he sighed in relief. There were an unexpectedly massive amount of types of mana he could utilize, and even more seemed to be out there for him to discover. Alen didn’t bother cleaning all of them. His focus was only on a single element.

Finally, he held his palm out in front of him and separated a portion of the pure mana inside of him. Carefully, he changed it to the nature of the recently purified version of water-element mana. He channeled it, and with a slight sloshing sound, a ball of water the size of a person’s head floated above his palm.

Alen pursed his lips at the amount. He used a bit too much mana, he guessed. With a shrug he drank from the ball of water, the cool fluids flowing down his parched throat. This was all he could do with the water mana, and he’d need a program to make anything else with it, but it served its purpose. He could now spare some mana to drink water. It had a cost, though. If his mana’s conversion rate for necrotic mana was 1:1, Alen felt that the water element was around 1:3. Still, due to his high Wisdom stat, along with Control and Intelligence, he didn’t have to spend a lot of mana or effort to be able to conjure a ball of water.

If he made an attack spell program purely through using water mana though, he guessed it would take a disgusting amount of magic for it to be able to reach the power of a single Rotfire Bolt.

He paused. It was Rotfire Blast now. The system had changed the name of the spell, but Alen doubted it messed with his program at all. It probably meant that his spell was now strong enough to be a tier higher than it was previously, enough for a name change, supposedly. Alen wondered how strong it would be now. He contemplated shooting it off at a random wall, but he was afraid of any ruckus it could potentially cause. After all, this place was full of dangerous shit, and while he was confident in being able to fend a couple of them off with a few spells, it would drain his mana to dangerous levels. That wasn’t even considering the monsters that would head towards the direction of the battle afterward.

This wouldn’t be easy. Alen frowned. He needed to find a lone monster, then dispose of it quickly and loot its remains for spare pieces of chitin before escaping the area fast enough to avoid getting mobbed.

He nodded to himself. Better to risk a situation he had a degree of control in than be left open in an unexpected fight without any summons, which were effectively half of his combat capacity.

He moved around in the darkness of the night, using various spots for cover. The path forked to the left, and he followed, before entering a crevice of sorts that led onto a basin-like part of the canyon. The center held an oasis of sorts, surrounded by plants that looked like coconut trees. Moonlight sprinkled onto the clear water below, giving it a mesmerizing radiance. Near the water, a single animal lied down—asleep.

Alen crept closer and spotted a large, furred creature. It had the head of a female lion with a massive underbite, the lower teeth jutting out to cover the front teeth like jagged sword tips. It slept soundly, the two tails behind it lying still on the ground as it laid its head on its scaly, dragon-like front paws. The necromancer stared at it, thinking. From where he was, he didn’t feel any pressure that denoted the creature was much stronger than he was, but the feeling he got from it was bone-chilling.

He gritted his teeth and crept closer, his mana reaching out of his fingertips like an almost transparent black-green string. The strand approached it, and Alen felt it. Mana. Repressed. Powerful—no, incredibly powerful mana. It felt like an inferno, suppressed within every inch of skin, muscle, and bone within the beast’s body as if waiting to burst out.

It wasn’t as strong as Alexandrius, but it was damn close. Alen clenched his fist, hurriedly destroying the strand of mana lest he notify the sleeping creature of his presence.

With hurried steps, he snuck out of the oasis, mentally marking its location inside his head. When he had the chance, he’d come back. Something about the water in that basin felt… different. The color was a blue so clear it didn’t even seem like normal water. No, Alen felt it along with the monster’s aura. The water had mana infused into it, and Alen was sure that it would give him a lot of XP if he drank from it. At least, he hoped so. It made sense, seeing as how a powerful beast was sleeping next to it, he figured that the oasis played a part in making it as strong as it was.

He nodded to himself, skulking deeper into the canyon.

As he went forward, his encounters with other creatures—namely giant bugs—became more frequent, prompting him to take extra care in everything he did. Alen stopped at one point, and decided to turn back, taking another path leading to the side instead, because of the fact that the amount of monsters in his direction forward was increasing.

Finally, after another hour of walking, he noticed a single beetle feasting on the carcass of what looked to be a praying mantis. The beetle was an inky green, and its sharp mandibles tore pieces off of the mantis’s flesh. Alen let out a sigh of relief.

He recognized the bug.

They’d encountered one on the way to the town where they encountered Alexandrius. It was hiding inside a concealed wall in the canyon. The bug had the ability to create thin layers of earth to disguise its lair, and when they’d passed its home, it had burst out and attacked the three of them. It was called Froghorn Beetle, because of its throat that would bloat outwards like a frog’s before it would spit out a petrifying mist. It was as strong as someone on the ninth threshold, but its intelligence made it an easier opponent than the mana in its body would suggest.

Alen got as close to the bug as he could, before he pointed his palm at the creature. Mana gathered in his hand, coating his entire forearm in black-green flames. He was stuck staring at it for a moment, recalling the faces of the bandits he’d incinerated with the spell just a day ago. He shook his head as the stinging sensation of his wounded arm returned. He numbed his senses around that area, pushing away the dark thoughts in his mind.

He’d start being a bitch about morals when he had the luxury of not worrying about death. Right now, it was time to see how powerful Rotfire Blast had become.

The mana in his hand intensified, slithering down his forearm to cover his entire hand in a thick layer of Rotflame. The mana was condensed the most it could with the current program, and with a mental command from the necromancer… the spell was released!

A violent sound exploded out from his right hand, fifteen percent of his mana draining away as a cone of flames exploded towards the beetle. It sensed the monstrous mana and turned, only to get engulfed in the torrent of black-green flames. Alen immediately rushed in, his injured arm flailing behind him as he gathered a large amount of mana in his hands to create a super-powered Blightbolt.

The strategy was relatively simple. Use Rotfire to melt away at the beetle’s defenses, then use Blightbolt to tear away at its insides.

His figure blurred into the still-raging flames. His hand reached out, a pained screech came from within the flames. Alen saw the flames give way. An attack was coming. He was far enough to dodge. He bent hid torso and slid under the horn the beetle had swept to the side. His legs bent, a show to his lack of dexterity, the maneuver had sent him off balance. He rolled under the beetle, wincing with a grunt as he irritated the wound on his left arm. He raised his right hand and fired the spell. The blight exploded into the beetle’s exposed flesh, draining away at the life within the muscle and turning it into what looked like rotten beef jerky. Alen gasped in pain as one of the beetle’s sharp legs cut his side, a part of his body without Numb Senses in effect.

He grit his teeth. Alen’s hand shot out like a viper, covered in a malevolent black ice. It sunk into the monster’s wounds. He clenched his fist against part of the blighted muscle tissue. It bloated. Bloated like a balloon.

Sklurt! The bloated flesh exploded, spraying rotting green blood into Alen’s face as the necrosis brutally ate away at the giant insect’s flesh. It screeched, opening its wings and flying away with unsteady movements. Black-green flame covered its body. It bounced off a wall, sending dust everywhere. The rot ate away at its wings. It crashed into the sand a few meters away, limping forward as a festering wound ate away at the inside of its head—towards its brain.

Finally, quietly, it slumped to the ground, the life leaving its body.

Alen ran up to it and immediately conjured Rotflame into his right hand. He winced at the persistent stinging of his injured arm. The hand clasped against the middle of the beetle’s horn, the Rotfire melting away at the chitin. The horn’s meter-long tip snapped off, and the required strands of consciousness gathered within it. Alen held it tightly in his hand before running off.

He dived into one of the many crevices burrowed into the canyon wall and took the horn inside with him. Scampering in, he leaned against the wall and looked outside. He waited.

Nothing.

A sigh of relief left his mouth. It looked like no other monsters had been attracted by the fight. He checked his mana. Forty-four percent. He nodded to himself and reapplied Numb Senses, before conjuring a large glob of water in his hands. He gingerly cleaned the wound with it, whimpers leaking out of his mouth as Numb Senses failed to completely dull the pain assaulting his brain. He was trembling, and his vision was blurring.

Finally, he finished. Alen breathed heavily, looking at the cloth he had cleaned and one again wrapped over his wound. He stared at the remaining water floating over his palm and willed it to splash all over his body.

His robe turned to a darker shade as it got wet, the water flowing out of the little crevice along with bits of green and red blood. He winced at the wound on his side. It was thankfully quite shallow, but it quite frankly stung a fuck-lot. Alen repressed the desire to allocate mana in order to numb the wound. His reserves were low already, hovering at about thirty or so percent. He hadn’t used Blightbolt in a while, and his neglect to increasing its mana efficiency showed with how much magic it used up. Rotfire Blast was a monster as well, completely destroying the beetle’s natural armor at the cost of nearly a fifth of his mana reserves. He’d increased the mana used to fuel the spell to make it stronger, but he expected it to only take ten percent at most. That just went to show how much he needed to improve his magic.

Alen looked at his wounds with bloodshot eyes. These were becoming a problem, and they were only going to get worse now that he lacked Roland to tank for him. He wasn’t skilled enough in controlling his undead to be able to guarantee the same amount of safety Roland had provided him and Lynn, so he had to find another way to solve the problem. Alen didn’t want to risk waiting for the wounds to heal naturally, so he was just going to make them heal faster. He clenched his fists and let out a breath, opening up the spell program for Blightbolt.

It still made use of his old mana-programming method, which involved using PHP commands like loops and if-statements. He was going to revamp the spell completely with his developing mana-programming language to create a spell that was long due.

It was time to create a life-drain spell.