Part Twelve

You know, when someone comes back covered in blood, it’s good manners to ask them what happened. So the fact that no one did bothers me just a tad bit more than it should. I mean, I know it’s not my blood, but they don’t! For all they knew, I could’ve nearly bled to death out there. Granted, I do seem to nearly die every other day, so maybe they’ve just gotten numb to it? But then why does Kalia still yell at me?

Being splashed with monster blood was pretty much an inevitability when you routinely dismembered them while fighting. Severed limbs and arterial sprays usually ensured I got hit once, so it was a godsend that my coat was waterproof. Most liquids just slid right off, leaving no trace that it had ever been there. Except monster blood.

I couldn’t figure out why it was that one specific thing that was exempt. Why couldn’t it have been something more uncommon, like tomato juice? Not that it was uncommon, I just didn’t encounter tomato juice on a daily basis.

…my mind goes to some weird places. Why am I thinking about tomato juice while scrubbing monster blood stains out of my coat? I’m pretty sure anyone who’d be listening to this conversation would be bored by now.

Fortunately, all it took to get the blood out was some scrubbing with a wet cloth. Why that worked I didn’t know, but maybe the coat’s properties were helping to clean it. It just seemed like the weirdest feature to be included into equipment. Like, the auto-repair thing I understood, but auto-cleaning? Actually, that was probably more helpful than I realized.

With my post-battle cleanup done, I went back into the backyard. Alicia and Kalia had set up a bunch of bricks they’d gotten from who-knows-where, and Alicia was using them as target practice for her spells.

…[Firebolt], right? I’m pretty sure that’s what she said it was called. She could only see the first and second grade spells, but both seemed pretty useful. [Firebolt] should be obvious, but the other one was called….[Flare], that’s right. I think it’s supposed to be a close-range spell of some sort based on the description she showed me, but I didn’t fully understand it. Still, it’s got a more obvious use than [Mental Decay]. What the hell am I supposed to do with that one?

I’d actually tested the spell before I went to the Kovis nest, and it was one of the reasons I’d felt the need to vent. The spell's effect was basically what it said on the tin. It stripped away at a target's mental faculties. The Goblin I’d tested it on had turned into even more of a dumb drooling mess than they usually are by the time I was done with it. Which may sound useful, but really wasn’t. The main reason for that? How finicky the spell was.

Like [Seize], [Mental Decay] required contact between the caster and the target for it to work, except that the latter required way more time to function. [Seize] needed only a second of contact to cause issues with the target's body, but [Mental Decay] had needed a full minute to whittle away at the Goblin's intelligence. And even then, its instincts were still functioning just fine. I probably could’ve turned it into a vegetable with enough time, but I just didn’t have a reason to do that, so I’d ended the experiment.

I just didn’t have a need for this kind of spell. In fact, the only use I could come up with for it was to use it as an intimidation tactic against other humans. But really, I had many other easier, more grisly ways to do that. I mean, hello, I carry a pair of freaking swords around wherever I go. Pretty sure I could use them for something like that.

Oh, I did get one thing out of it: A new Title. Yep. A new Title that did absolutely freaking nothing. It was basically one of those ‘freebie’ achievements you see in games sometimes, the ones that you’ll always get, but don’t actually do bum squat. Though it appeared that I could advance it if I kept up my magic training, so who knows. It may be worth something in the future.

Anyway, I was intent on benching [Mental Decay] for the foreseeable future. My focus for Grudge Magic was instead on building up to the fifth grade spell, [Dreadful Birth], which would apparently allow me to create familiars. Depending on what they could do, I had high expectations for that particular spell. But alas, its complexity meant need to train for awhile before I’d even attempt it, as each attempt could cost me a Gem of Hatred if I failed. And since I had very few of them, I was being particularly stingy with them.

This reminds me of when I’d have elixirs in games and not want to use them, nearly causing me to lose. Hm, I suppose sometimes you just have to bite the bullet. Not that I have any bullets.

“Michael, are you just going to stand there, or are you going to actually do something?”

I’d gotten so deep into thought that I hadn’t noticed Kalia standing right in front of me, looking irritated for some reason.

“You’re the one who said that anyone who's staying back at the base should train. So why are you just standing around and watching Alicia? Unless…you were staring at her butt?”

“……Wait what!? Why would that be the conclusion you come to?”

“I don’t know! All I know is that you stood here for five minutes watching Alicia. So you were either spacing out, or you were perving out on her.”

“I was spacing out, obviously. Or rather, I was lost in thought.”

“……About Alicia’s butt?”

“No! Why is this something we’re discussing?”

“I don’t know. I just think you may subconsciously like staring at-.”

“If you finish that sentence, I will pick you up and dunk you in the horrible pool of grossness I found earlier. I’m not kidding.”

“…Um, am I interrupting something?”

Gaaaah! Damn you comedic timing! Gwyn just had to return at this exact moment. And now he was looking at me askance. Did some mysterious force like making my life harder than it had to be?

“Ehe, I may have taken a joke a step too far. Michael can be a bit of a hothead at times, which makes it fun to push his buttons.”

”Oh really? Well, you may find yourself taking one too many steps into a pool of horrible grossness in the not-to-distant future.”

“…What’s a pool of horrible grossness?”

“Something that Kalia may of may not find herself becoming acquainted with all too soon. And yes, it’s as horrible and gross as its name suggests.”

I put on my best menacing smile as I attempted to intimidated Kalia back into line. For some reason, I felt like she was becoming cheekier with me as the days went past. I blamed Alicia. She was being a bad influence on Kalia. Also, just for the record, I was not staring at Alicia’s butt. And I can’t believe I had to say that in my own internal narration.

***

Gwyn’s arrival finally catalyzed us to forget about pools of grossness and anything else that certainly didn’t happen in the last five minutes. Apparently, he’d been out looking for clues as to what may be happening here, and had actually found something.

“Seriously? I was just thinking about how I didn’t want to waste any of them, and now a whole bunch appear? Haaah, I hate this apocalypse.”

“Have….you been in another apocalypse? Also, you know what these are?”

“Yeah, they’re Gems of Hatred, right? They’re just smaller than any I’ve seen before.”

Compared to the ones I’d gotten in the Siege Dungeon, these were miniscule. It was basically like Gwyn was holding a handful of salt, only the Gems were black and slightly bigger than salt. Actually, it was like he was holding a bunch of peppercorns. That’s a much better analogy, and the one I definitely said first.

“Huh, they’re kinda like the Gems of Flames we extracted from Brad and his friends after the Wyvern hit them with its spell. I wonder what ever happened to them?”

“The Gems? Brad took them when he was discharged, though I don’t know what for. He may have actually forgotten about them by the time we got out of there.”

“Oh, okay. Uh, so where’d you find these?”

“Scattered about actually. I checked several different buildings, and I found a few in each one. How much do you know about these, Michael?”

“Aside from what the description says? Um, I spoke to a Dark Mage NPC back into the fort, and he told me they have several uses aside from just drawing the Grudge out of them. They’re apparently used as catalysts for every kind of Dark Magic, and they’re often ground up and used as reagents in Alchemy.”

“But that doesn’t explain why they were scattered about.”

“Yeah, it doesn’t….wait.” a memory flashed by in my head. “Miasma. That’s why.”

It made sense. The swarm of Undead in the last town had been fighting amidst clouds of Miasma, which was directly produced by Grudge. If there had been Gems scattered about there too, then it may explain why everything turned into Undead so suddenly. We wouldn’t have seen them since they were so small and we weren’t looking for them, but it was possible that they’d been there all the same.

I explained that to the others, but Kalia was quick to point out a hole in my theory.

“But then, why are these still here? If the same thing happened here that happened there, shouldn’t the Gems have been consumed?”

“They would be, unless they were replaced, either by new ones being generated by the monsters' deaths, or by the shadow creature. Wait no, that doesn’t quite make sense.”

My Grimoire had some details on Grudge and Miasma, and from how I understood it, any Grudge produced by the dying monsters wouldn’t have turned into Gems, but more Miasma. And while Miasma would turn corpses into Undead, it shouldn’t have happened that fast or in those numbers. Which again brought us back to the shadow creature.

“Ugh, I just don’t know enough to come up with a solid theory. All I can guarantee is that these Gems are most likely involved with what happened this morning, though I can't figure out whether the Undead or the Miasma was the goal there. I'm not even sure what kind of magic would result in something like that.”

“I suppose that’s better then nothing. Knowing something is probably better than knowing nothing. I just wish we knew what that shadow was.”

“So do I. So do I.”

***

With very little information to go on, we couldn’t come to a definite conclusion about what may be happening here. Even when we factored in the Egg-Guardians and Brood-Mother I’d fought, there still wasn’t sufficient evidence to declare anything, though it was clear that the monster population had seen several drastic drops recently. Why else would there be five C-Ranks when the rest of the nest had been so weak?

Regardless, none of us felt like running away right now, not unless we felt like we were in immediate danger, or we had something concrete we could report. The vagueness of this incident meant that we couldn’t expect anyone to pay much attention to it, especially when there were so many other crises occurring at the same time.

This would effectively mean that we would be screwed if something major did happen, but given how suddenly World Decay began, it was hard to argue one way or the other about this. Chances were that something would happen here eventually. We just didn’t know what.