The Dark Lord of Crafting

Feather Fall kicked in, allowing me to drop relatively gently to the dunes below. That was fortunate, because my everything hurt. Harpies were calling to each other above as they retreated out of reach of the incoming soldiers, some of whom came to the edge of the bridge to watch me. I moved beneath them, planting my sword in the sand before leaning against a support pillar and digging through my pack for some food. Though I had resigned myself to regenerating on the strength of beets alone, I was delighted to find a bread coin mixed in with the vegetables, and slapped it into my hand.

Soft, chewy, delicious.

While I was eating, Gastard was alone atop the tower, either dead or dying. Being struck by lightning while wearing a metal suit sounded like a death sentence. Even if his heart hadn't stopped, he was going to be all kinds of burned and in need of immediate medical attention, which I could not provide him. We hadn't known each other for long, but I had liked the guy. If he was gone, it was my fault. I'd brought us here and put us up against a demon. Now there was nothing I could do to help him but hope.

The cuts on my face closed, and my joints felt less ruined. More food would be necessary to get me back to full health, but as I searched my pack for another edible material, a zombie plummeted to the dunes ten feet away from me. It landed hard, like a crash test dummy, but a second later, it was levering itself up and shambling toward me.

The shouting from above took on a different tone. Someone was giving orders, but other people were just screaming. Was anyone that upset about a dead demon? My elder sign tattoo was glowing faintly. There may have been a notification ding I missed during the fight, but it rarely gave me any visual cues. When my screen popped up, it jumped right into the new message.

Journal Quests Notifications Materials Crafting

Achievement: Purifier (2) Tainted (1)

By slaying a demon, you have marked yourself as an enemy of Discord. Entities aligned with Bedlam will actively seek to eliminate you, driven by hatred to ignore obstacles and easier prey. As you know, killing ranked entities can cause spiritual corruption. Banishing Beleth without the necessary filters has resulted in the absorption of a quantity of demonic essence. The elder sign will protect you from some of the side effects of this change, but the resistance it provides is not complete.

You are [Tainted].

Base physiology adjusted: The candidate is immune to all non-magical poisons and diseases. Darkvision applied.

"As you know!" I yelled at the floating blue box. The immunity was great. Hopefully, I wouldn't have to worry about infected zombie bites at all anymore, and now that I thought about it, the night seemed brighter than it had a few minutes ago. Under the shadow of the bridge, the sands appeared more gray than black, and the desert beyond looked crisp and clear in the moonlight. So I had been absorbing Beleth's essence, whatever that meant, though it had looked like everything was going into the sword. Was Kevin's sword the reason I was getting corrupted, or would this have happened anyway if I had killed a demon without it?

"What are the rules?" I asked aloud, but as always, the System refused to engage me in conversation. I tabbed over to the main status screen.

Status

Assigned Class: Survivor

Level: 21

Advancement: 67%

Attributes:

Might: E

Speed: F+

Presence: F

Armor Rating: 13

Traits: Darkvision, Immunity to Poison and Disease

My attributes hadn't changed, but my level had jumped up, recovering almost all the experience I had used on enchantments. The listing for my new traits was as light on details as the rest of my stats.

I was so distracted, I'd forgotten about the zombie.

One of its legs had broken, so it fell down almost as soon as it got up, and was now army crawling toward me. Grabbing my sword, I performed a quick execution, decapitating the monster before it could cause me any trouble.

Two more dropped off the bridge, one of which landed right next to me. I yelped and hacked it until it stopped moving. The bellow of a troll echoed across the barren landscape. It sounded like it was much further down the road. There was a lot of noise coming from up there, moans and howls and shouts, and not all the human voices belonged to soldiers. I heard lillits voices as well, and women and children, all mixed. What was going on?

It hit me. Beleth had been controlling the monsters. Now he was gone, and they would do what their instincts demanded. I slipped the sword into its loop on my belt and started running. It wasn't just Gastard I'd gotten killed. There had been monsters both at the front and at the back of the column. The soldiers would have to deal with those in front. They were just as likely to be attacked as anyone now that the demon was gone, but what about the end of the column? The lillits would be unarmed, and I didn't know if there were any Dargothians there to so much as attempt to fend off the horde. Even if, by some miracle, they could band together and fight off the zombies, there had been at least two more trolls, and they would be completely helpless against them. No matter how fast I ran, lillits were going to die.

The sand sucked at my feet, and I felt like I was moving at a snail's pace, though I was pushing with everything I had. The weight of my armor didn't help matters, but at least the bread had given me my wind back. A phantom screamed somewhere overhead, and I ignored it. It would attack me when it chose, and I couldn't afford to wait around for it to dive. Besides what the demon had brought, mobs were going to be spawning around me all night, either on the road or in the sand. By running under the road, I could cause zombies to pop up in the middle of the lillits, but if I didn't go, it would be an all night slaughter.

It was hard to judge the distance I needed to cross, but after a few minutes of slogging across the dunes, I stopped at a column and started crafting a way up. Placing blocks in a spiral around the support, I ascended as fast as I could, which felt agonizingly slow. Only five feet up, the phantom chose its moment to strike. Its scream was warning enough for me to press myself against the column and face out. I didn't get my sword out, but I shielded my face with my hands as it rushed by, and I felt its tail whip against my forearm. Half a heart gone.

The manta-like creature flipped over in mid-flight, preparing to come right back. But as it turned, a harpy dipped under the bridge and drove it into the ground. They were still helping me. Whatever their motivations, I knew I was going to have to find some way to repay them when this was over. Rushing to complete my off-brand staircase, I fumbled more than a few of my placements and ended up dropping a handful of coins. The dunes could have them. Zombies weren't the only thing falling off the edge of the bridge. Well ahead of me, at what must have been the end of the line, small shapes were dropping to the sands. Lillits were being pushed off, or taking their chances with a leap of faith if it meant getting away from whatever was in front of them.

A minute later, I was pulling myself over the lip of the bridge into a crowd of panicking little folk. Someone kicked me in the head.

"Wait," I said, ignoring the pain in my skull to swing my legs up onto the road. "I'm on your side."

Someone recognized me, and I heard my name being repeated in the crowd. There wasn't any room for them to clear a space. Lillits were pressing in from the back of the line, but there wasn't anywhere for those at the front to go. Most of them weren't paying any attention to me, too busy struggling to keep from getting knocked down or off. I stood a foot above the river of lillits, and so did the Dargothians. There had been soldiers placed among the captives to keep order, but they weren't doing a wonderful job of it, and none that I saw were trying to reach those in immediate danger.

Two hundred yards down the road, people were dying. The zombies were crawling over each other to get at new victims, or crowding around those that were already down. The trolls were happy to smash a few zombies to get to their prey, and the one consolation was that they were stopping to feed rather than murdering for the fun of it.

I pressed forward; the lillits bumping and jostling all around me. The soldiers didn't know who I was. I could have been one of them, and they were more concerned with saving their own skins than getting in my way. All the voices blended together, and I didn't see Boffin or Brenys or anyone I knew, but they could have easily gone by me in the crowd. I was fighting the current, and I got my sword up and over my head to avoid inadvertently slicing anyone with from my hip. My perception narrowed to the goal ahead of me, a troll bent over of someone who had been alive only minutes before, of someone who had died because I didn't think things through.

Getting to the back of the crowd felt like stepping up out of a river. There was finally room to move. The monsters had appeared absorbed with their feasting, but as soon as I was within striking range, they all seemed to notice me at the same time. A dozen zombies reached for me at once, and I started swinging.

Kevin's sword was so sharp, it made mine seem like a cudgel. In the first few seconds, hands and heads were severed. I wasn't Gastard, but I didn't need to be. The zombies were stupid, slow, and I felt like I had taken a super serum. There were monsters all around me, but the blade sliced through them with barely any resistance.

A troll swept one of the shamblers aside and raised one massive, gnarled fist to crush my skull. I drove the sword up under its rib cage, and a dim light swept along my arms. The diamond was burning rose red, reaching its limit. Light diffused, vanishing like a mist. The hulking beast's arm dropped, and it gave a surprised hoot before slumping down on to its side.

They kept coming, and my arms grew heavy. A lamprey like mouth latched onto my hand, and I ripped it off. Back to seven hearts. Blood and gore made the stones slick beneath my boots, nearly causing me to slip, and I dropped back as more zombies crawled over their fallen to reach me. Another troll was beating its chest a dozen paces away, preparing to barrel through the intervening monsters. My helmet was with Beleth. One hit would be all it took to end my one man stand against the tide.

Beyond the troll, something else moved; the three-headed monster I had spotted from the tower. A lion, a goat, and a snake. It was a chimera. The press of mobs concealed its body, but its heads raised well above them. It might have been even bigger than the trolls. There was no time to plan, or to so much as take a deep breath. More hands were reaching for me, more tentacles, more mouths. It was all I could do not to succumb to the tide in any given moment.

Then there was a light. It differed from the glow of the gem, pure white, and it strained my eyes. Wings flapped overhead, and the nearest zombies recoiled. A torch dropped right in front of me, bouncing on the bloodstained stones. My torch, enchanted with Shadowbane. The harpy flew away.