“What the hell?” Mason asked. He stared at a pile of pale corpses high enough to bury himself in. They had passed through the portal Artorias formed and it had brought them to the entrance of the hive, but a great deal had changed in all the time they were trapped.

“I’d imagine Torysen escaped and put up a pretty good resistance,” Leornal looked over the pile and out into the daylight blinking and squinting with discomfort.

Crawling over the unceremonious pile of gremlins at the cave’s mouth, Mason grinned stretched his body out to revel in the sunlight. There was really no telling how long they had been in that cave, but he knew it was too long.

He pushed those questions aside and instead turned his face up toward the sun, “I can’t even begin to explain how happy I am that we got to teleport out rather than wandering through any more of those tunnels. The Trials might not have much that’s convenient to them, but a good old escape portal reminds me of some of my favorite video games.”

Leornal had been inspecting the packed earth in front of the entrance and every sign of fortification and struggle in the area, but he turned to look curiously at Mason for the end of that sentence. “Video games? That translates. Why does that translate? You couldn’t possibly have those in your world without mana.”

It was Mason’s turn to look confused, “We used electricity, not mana.” He considered how to explain electricity, “It was like using lightning bolts to power machines. We could see moving pictures and control them with, well, a controller. Sometimes a keyboard or a camera?”

“I think you’d be surprised how much of that makes sense in my language. Not all of it though. You mean lightning bolts like the big streaks of light during a storm? I suppose there are runes to capture their energy… but humans can’t use runes at all, can they?” Leornal had lost all focus on the campground at this point, trying desperately to picture what Mason meant.

“Well, electricity can be controlled a lot of different ways. We used chemistry, which you guys might know as alchemy, to store energy, and then circuit boards which are like…” His face scrunched up as he tried to explain something that seemed so common to him, “runes made out of metals and plastics?”

Leornal nodded, but didn’t look like he understood much at all. “Your world sounds fascinating. I guess without mana, you had to find some way to progress.” He looked uncertain. “I’m uncomfortable suggesting this but maybe you and Mowrytal should compare memories. That is something you can do in that tree Artorias kept talking about, right?”

Though he didn’t completely understand why, Mason smiled at that as he responded, “Probably. I’m still figuring out how it all works myself. But it seems possible enough.”

“Right,” Leornal said awkwardly, turning his attention back to the markings on the ground. “There are a lot of signs of a pretty major fight here, but the mountain of bodies makes that clear enough. It also doesn’t look like they have written us off for dead. It is customary to leave an embellishment rune on the site of a fallen companion, but they have only left a sign for danger.”

Mason followed where Leornal was pointing to a spot between where all the tents had been set up. He flicked on mana sight and saw a figure, but it meant nothing to him beyond what Leornal had already explained. “But they’re gone, obviously. Do you think they just trusted us to catch up if we survived?”

“That would make the most sense. They probably planned to report the danger to the council, and then return here on a rescue mission if it was permitted. We’d be wise to make it to the city before they make their report, but we’ll have to hurry to catch up with them.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask; you all just refer to where your people live as the city, but don’t you have a name for it?” Mason asked.

Leornal made a disapproving noise, “The council did not adapt well to the Trials. They insist on calling the city New Marra, and you’ll find that there, we refer to ourselves as Marrans.”

Once again, Mason was confused. “Marrans, huh? But Shayjol’s family said they could be called the Darkest Night.”

“All of us who live outside of the city have taken up that name,” Leornal said proudly. “The Corrosi began to call us that when we began fighting back against them and winning. We wear it as a badge of honor to prove that we are changing. The council sees it as shunning our roots.”

“The Trials call you the Darkest Night too. Or, it called Mowry that. I, uh, received a notification about it earlier.”

Leornal gave him a curt nod, “The one thing the Trials seems to respect is the ability to define one’s self. Wait, hold on.” He held out a hand to indicate Mason stop moving.

“What is-” Mason started, but another sign from Leornal convinced him to shut up.

He watched Leornal and tried to follow his line of sight. Sure enough, off in the distance the bushes rustled and a skittering sort of babbling noise echoed back to them quietly. “Goblins.”

Leornal pulled out his bow and loosed an arrow, striking a tree above where they stood concealed. One of them made a squawking noise, and then the rustling pressed further away as the goblins ran off. “Damn little creeps. Must have only been a few of them or they would have attacked. Definitely would have tried to do some damage if I had injured one.”

“How dangerous are they, really?” The only thing Mason could think to gauge their threat levels off of were the games and stories of Earth, but some of those made goblins the weakest of all enemies, but in some of them they could be a pretty serious threat.

“Trivial if its just one or two. They probably could smell the death around here and were looking for a meal. It’s unusual to see many of them this far south though, but maybe a few got bold and thought they could set up a new tribe. That’s why the Roving Bands exist, anyways.”

The expedition to catch up with the rest of the band was generally uninteresting. They didn’t seem to be all that far behind, so the path was clear and the surrounding areas had been scouted thoroughly by Torysen’s typically cautious patrolling style, which seemed to have been kicked up a notch since her mistake with the hive.

So Mason used that time to familiarize himself a little further with his latest improvements.

Congratulations! For crossing the threshold of 35 Focus Points, you’ve achieved level four. Receive one bonus FP to any skill.

Considering everything he had been through, level four really didn’t seem like much to be impressed by. Shayjol had already been that level before they entered the city of the Biord, after all. He shrugged and put the focus point into endurance, because if he planned to depend on more than spells, he would need to rely on his Focus and anything that would prevent him getting worn out during an extended fight.

You’ve learned your first spell: Indiscriminate Force.

Indiscriminate Force (Unrefined): A raw rune capable of transmuting your mana into a powerful, uncontrolled force. This power can be refined through further mastery of your Runecraft skill.

Looking further at his abilities, he realized that was a skill he had discovered as well.

Runecraft: Utilizing a primitive form of spell-weaving, you can move your mana into practiced patterns to draw out magical effects. Creativity unlocks greater potential of this skill.

Mowrytal had said something about giving him a basic rune so he didn’t bias his ability to create his own effects, so he wasn’t completely confused by this new skill. But without Mowry and Geralt’s help, he wasn’t sure he could even form the force rune, let alone make adjustments to it to create other effects.

He sighed, but when Leornal looked at him curiously, he just waved the other man off.

It had been a while, so he looked over his full status page.

Demon of the Darkest Night:

Amateur Magical Slayer

Level 4 (38 FP)

Health: 84/84 (2.7/hr)

Mana: 40/40 (3/hr)

Mana (Mardun): 40/40

Stamina: 83/83 (4.1/min)

Strength: 6 (0)

Agility: 6 (+1)

Intelligence: 9 (+1)

Willpower: 8 (+2)

Vitality: 6 (0)

Endurance: 7 (+1)

Creativity: 6 (+2)

Active Skills: Focus (17), Mana Vampirism (10), Analyze (7), Life Drain (6), Recovery (9)

Passive Skills: Equip (6), Staff Specialization (17), Blade Specialization (12), Footwork (3)

Mana Arts: Mana Sight (14), Mana Manipulation (17), Mana Tolerance (22), Mana-Blade (3), Shadow Stalk (10), Glamour (10), Stamina Drain (5), Runecraft (1)

Spells: Indiscriminate Force (1)

Soul Arts: Soul Steal, Walker

The influence of the Trials was hard to really gauge. He was definitely stronger and faster than he once was. The fact that he could cast magic was a rather hard-to-overlook improvement, too. But did that have to do with these stats and skills that he was unlocking? Or did the Trials just show him what was already happening inside?

Mason decided to bring Leornal into his musings after all, “So in a lot of video games in my world, there were systems like the Trials. You could see your stats and all sorts of other screens and such that would let you improve your virtual character. It’s weird that the Trials are so similar though. Did your world have the same thing in your games?”

“Well,” Leornal thought, “I wasn’t exactly known for playing those games, but it does seem like many of them had much in common with the system of this world. For the most part though, the levels and statuses are fairly unobtrusive here.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, challenges motivate you to try out possibilities close to what you’re capable of, right? And the focus points encourage you to improve on your own physical and mental abilities, with some sort of additional benefit. Doesn’t that mean the status system in the Trials merely motivate us?” Leornal talked with a glassy look in his eye, and Mason presumed he, too, was looking at his status screen.

“The really difficult part of the Trials are all the assaults and threats,” Leornal added absentmindedly, though this obviously caught Mason’s attention.

“Wait, hold on. I think you forgot I’m new. What do you mean by that?”

Leornal did stop, and looked at Mason analytically. “We just fought legions of soul-dead beasts, and you fought and stole the soul of an invader from another plane. Surely you didn’t just set that aside in your mind? The Trials force conflict. It’s why waves of goblins show up to wage war on Marra every few days. Why the Corrosi slaughter their way through our forests.

“You didn’t get the introduction, did you?” Leornal looked shocked now.

Mason just sighed, “What extremely important thing am I glaringly unaware of now?”

“When a race arrives in this plane, they have a small settlement with supplies provided to them so that they do not die of the usual boring deaths, and a representative of sorts explains to them the basics of The Trials, how to use their status screens, how important it is to grow strong. Then they tell you that the other races want to kill them and that monsters will spawn randomly forever and the representative leaves your group to their fate.”

Mason blinked, stunned. “Wow, I just appeared in a haze of blood in a dungeon, and then got teleported to an empty field and almost killed by a bunch of angry squirrels.”

Leornal laughed, “Well, I suppose that staff didn’t come without any cost then. But I suppose there was more to your question about video games and the Trials earlier. I have a theory that every species gets to the point where they assume everything would just be easier if a person can see the details of what’s going on inside of them.”

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

“Right. So among whatever the Trials actually do, they help you see your growth, motivating you to try and change and improve.”

“How kind of them. So is the constant threat of death their way of helping as well?”

“Perhaps that’s just what The Trials think is fun?”