Night 16

Finally, I was back at the chained water source. The guards had apparently increased their patrols, but they seemed more concentrated in the south, making it easy enough to sneak around further north. I continued where Tomar and I had left off a week ago, but I first had to scratch away the script again, because it had been restored with paint.

This had actually been one thing I was interested in, what would happen if the script was damaged. The people here apparently didn’t understand the script, but there weren’t any special requirements to modify this “magic tool.” As long as you painted the script on correctly, the water source would work. Apparently they had people who were capable of that much. Not that it would take more than a template on paper and a steady hand.

I replaced the water source script with another one using chalk. When I activated it, I could feel the mana stream out of the cube again. As I waved my hand around, I took a careful look around the square, but I was all alone. No beasts in sight. I breathed a sigh of relief and continued on with my experiments. Would’ve sucked if a beast had appeared again right now, I thought with a chuckle.

So far, this script was giving me the most important hints I had about how the water sources functioned. Based on our experiments, I was assuming that not everything had “mana” inside it. At least not to a degree that would be enough to produce any kind of effect with an Omega script. I could also deduce that mana was not some mysterious force inside the cube that did magical things. It would freely stream out of the cube if you told it to. Combined with the fact that this water source was known to give limited amounts of water, that meant the mana was something that was stored, let out, and then had to be recovered over time.

An important puzzle piece that was still missing was the purpose of the stones. They acted as the trigger for the scripts, but that had turned out to just have been for ease of use. You place a stone, you get water. Everybody would understand that concept. It was Tomar’s question about whether this was actually necessary that made me look into it again. As it turned out, it wasn’t. I was able to modify the script in such a way that made it run indefinitely, without a stone, and all the water source did as a result was output mana. That meant Tomar’s other theory was probably right as well. If a script running without stone produced nothing but mana, the stone must be the key ingredient for turning mana into water.

I missed working with Tomar on this, but for the moment this was how it had to be. In a few hours I needed to be back in bed, where Tomar was expecting to wake up in the morning, but I was making progress again. At last.

Night 20

Every night I was out the door as soon as I got control over Tomar’s body. After I had spent an entire week letting him rest, getting back to scripting had been a rush. A boring job at day and an interesting one at night. I was starting to feel like myself again.

Weaving through the streets and alleyways I avoided the patrols with ease. The guards really weren’t much to write home about. They always took the same routes at the same times. But they were probably more on the lookout for beasts than people. Maybe their routine would work for that purpose. However, for a human, avoiding them became childsplay if you paid attention.

I arrived at the water source and immediately set up. Ever since I had started working here at night, I always cleaned up after myself, leaving the water source in a functioning state. I figured the citizens wouldn’t care much about the chalk, as long as the water kept running. Based on my chalk script still being there, I had probably been right. I took another quick look around, but I was all alone. Let’s see...

The first test that I had planned for today was what I came to think of as “multi-scripting.” Both the water source and the ritual platform had only one script on them. I had kept it that way until now, but it was time to test whether it actually was a limitation. At least I didn’t see a reason for that in the script. It defined the surface where the stone would have to be placed and where the water would come out, but I didn’t have a reason to believe that it wouldn’t work with two scripts at the same time.

I went to the opposite side of the cube and drew the same water source script, but with the output set to this side of the cube. When I placed a blue stone on the cube, water streamed out of both holes at once. Eureka!

In that moment of happiness, I heard a weird noise in the distance. I didn’t see anything, but it did make me a little nervous. Late at night... alone at the water source... no guards in sight... I thought, yea, okay. It is a little scary.

Now that I knew I could run multiple scripts on one cube, there was no reason why I couldn’t use one or two sides to prepare scripts I could use to defend myself. That had worked once and it would work even better now that I was prepared for it. After learning that I could activate specific scripts by giving specific input locations, I prepared two in case of emergency. That should be enough, even if two beasts were to appear. That taken care of, I happily went back to doing tests on the remaining sides.

I was just playing around with the output angles of the water streams when I heard a voice behind me. “Tomar, what are you doing?”

My eyes went wide as my head snapped around and saw a young girl standing there. “What are you doing here, Riala!?”

“I saw you go out and wanted to see where you were going,” she said innocently. “Are you researching again?”

“I am, but... Riala, you shouldn’t be here. It’s after curfew.”

“You’re here too,” she said with a pout.

Crap, what do I do? I thought. Stupid question, I have to get her home.

“You know what, you’re right. We should both head home.”

I stood up and took Riala’s hand before heading in the direction of her home. I would have to be way more careful. If even some girl managed to spot and follow me without me noticing, I clearly wasn’t the ninja I was envisioning. I had been careless because I wanted to get to the water source as soon as possible and only thought about avoiding the guards. Stupid mistake.

We hadn’t even left the square yet when I heard the weird noise from earlier again. Looking around I didn’t see anything at first, until I noticed two dimly glowing red eyes staring at us from a dark alleyway. I stopped in my tracks and stared at it, while Riala looked up at me.

“What’s wrong, Tomar?” she said, before following my eyes and seeing the beast slowly walk into the moon’s light.

You can’t be serious... Again? This can’t be real...

Riala grabbed my arm and was about to scream when I put my other hand over her mouth. Leading her with the arm she was grabbing, I moved her behind my back to stand between the animal and her.

The beast was just standing there, staring me down. Based on everything I had heard, they were supposed to attack on sight. Now that I thought about it though, that morning, it had just stared at Tomar as well... until Phiona put herself between him and the beast, knife in hand.

I glanced back at the water source. The beast wasn’t doing anything, but I couldn’t just stand there. I started slowly moving backwards in the direction of the cube. With every step I took, the beast took one as well. I froze once again when I heard a deep, scratchy voice. “Human smells funny.” It was coming from the beast’s mouth.

At that moment, the town’s warning bells rang and seconds later a group of guards came running into the square, surrounding the beast. Another guard moved protectively in front of us. As soon as the line of sight was broken, the beast started growling.

My mind was racing. Stay here or move closer to the water source...? Whatever happened, I had to protect Riala and Tomar. And in case the guards weren’t up to the task, I would need the water source. Moving it is.

I lifted up Riala and started slowly walking backwards again, always keeping an eye on the guards and the beast. Four of them stood around it, keeping it in check, while another tried to get hits in from its blind spots. The tactic seemed to work well enough to hold it off at first, but the beast didn’t take any serious wounds. Seconds later, the first guard flew to the ground, deep, red gauges in its armor.

Fuck.

I turned around and ran to the water source while glancing back at the fight. Their formation broken, the guards took more and more hits. As soon as I arrived at the cube, I sat Riala down and rotated it to point one of my attack scripts at the beast. The same script that had crippled the other one. I screamed at the guards. “Out of the way!!”

It was doubtful that they would just listen to me, but my scream surprised them. Especially the one guard who thought he was still protecting us. Their concentration broken, they backed away from the beast to regroup.

With a clear line of sight, I put a blue stone to the cube and a stream of water penetrated the beast’s body. It screamed in pain, but didn’t go down. The shot had been good, I was sure of that. It had hit the beast in almost the same location and at almost the same angle as the other one. It should’ve worked! I thought with panic in my eyes.

The guards were confused for just a moment, but quickly realized that I had attacked the beast. They tried to surround it again, but it made an enormous leap and landed just meters away from me before launching and taking a swing at us with its claws. I grabbed Riala and tried to jump out of the way, but the beast scratched my arm deep. And with that, I lost control of Tomar’s body.

“Ow! What—”

‘SHIT!’