His chest was a little tight, his mouth and eyes wide. Was it shock? Surprise? A little hint of feeling intimidated? No. Not that. He had stamped that word out of his vocabulary long ago. Intrigue. That was it.
Who? Where? How? Why?
Through all the competing emotions, one stood out. A peculiar sensation of energy bouncing through his limbs, pounding in his chest.
Excitement.
Elliott Carpenter was excited.
Gosh, how long had it been since he’d last felt like that?
As the wormhole disappeared, there was barely any light for him to see where he was, but he could feel the slight flow of water around his ankles. In the air was a ghostly breeze, too soft to cause a flutter, but enough to circulate the stench that threatened to overwhelm them. He scrunched his nose at the sharp, rancid smell, like spoiled meat smothered in rotting eggs, topped off with last year’s gravy for good measure.
“Smells like your bedroom, Isabel. Maybe better.”
The blunt end of Isabel’s battle-axe crashed down atop his head with a metallic clang that echoed through the space. The blow would have killed most people. Elliott wasn’t most people.
“I believe we are in some sort of sewage area, Sir.”
“Ah, shit.”
“Yes, exactly, Sir.”
He glanced down at his waist and found his twin sister, Elsie, peering up at him with her roguish smile, her vibrant pink hair bunched with purple bands to either side.
“I take it this wasn’t you, Sir?” Isabel said, returning her axe – with its curved Adamantine blade – to its harness on her back. Of a height with himself, she had sparkling green eyes, in an olive-skinned face, with black hair that fell to her waist. She’d been with him for almost a century now, but much like him, people wouldn’t be able to tell her age from looking at her.
“No, it most certainly wasn’t,” Elliott replied. “Someone else did this. Someone who wanted us here.” He adjusted the lapels of his trench coat, a force of habit when he had a mystery on his hands.
“At least you’re both here with me,” he said, but he could feel the presence of one more.
“You’re him?” an unfamiliar female voice whispered behind them. “The Murderhobo?”
He turned around and cast a spell.
[Torch]
A small flame appeared near his left shoulder, casting shadows across the woman’s narrow face with its blossom cheeks beneath her ice-blue eyes. She was in her late teens, several inches shorter than himself. She’d been among the assassins sent to kill him. She was the only one he’d kept alive.
“Hobo is factually incorrect,” Elliott answered with his customary cheerfulness. “I’ve always had a place to live.”
Green hair spiralled to halfway down her neck and the orange light of the flame reflected off the gold crest of her dead house that was stitched into the left side of her dark-blue silk dress. In her right hand, white knuckles gripped a staff with a white oak handle, capped by a circular head with a small ball in its centre.
Rose Reese. The child prodigy. That’s what she’d been labelled on Earth. Only the second person in history – and the youngest – to test as a Black S rank. He wondered what the Academy of Mages would make of it if he ever told them how mistaken their Attunement testing was.
“But you are him?” she replied, a slight tremor in her voice. It was all well and good coming to kill Elliott Carpenter, the harmless, old, decrepit CEO, but now that the girl had seen his other side, she looked like she was reconsidering her life choices. Good to know she could learn.
The corners of his lips curved ever so slightly as he turned his back on her and looked around. Time to figure out just what they were dealing with. The light of the flame at his shoulder didn’t stretch far, so he dismissed it and cast another spell.
[Illuminate]
That spell required a little more of his mana reserves than the last one, tugging on the ball of energy that sat in the centre of his chest. It was a delicate balance controlling the exact tiny amount that he needed, like creating a canal from an ocean. Most people had mana openings like pores on their skin, allowing the residual mana in the air to flow through them when forming spells. Only the strongest were able to create and control their own reserve, not least because holding onto any sort of mana within the body was like walking around with a nuclear bomb in your chest.
He pushed the mana through several pathways from the many that were inside his body, hidden like invisible veins. It raged through him like a torrent of molten lava battling against the calming stream of an icy river. He directed that thin calming torrent out into the air, moulding the mana into a sigil. Like a master calligrapher engraving an unseen scroll, he shaped it with just the right lines, the right flicks, the right widths. When he was done in a fraction of a fraction of a second, a shimmer of soft light emanated from him, lighting up the area in a faint silvery glow as far as the naked eye could see.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
They were in an arched tunnel of reddish-brown cobblestone that reminded him very much of the streets of Victorian England that he had grown up on. It was wide enough for three people with dark water gently flowing between mounds of faeces. The water wasn’t deep, reaching just above the ankles of his combat boots and the mounds weren’t much higher. The sewer wouldn’t have looked out of place on Earth, albeit it from an older age, but he very much doubted they were still on Earth.
Unless he had missed something, nobody on Earth should have been capable of transporting him against his will, not to mention that wormholes just weren’t a thing. Portals and gateways across Earth, sure. Wormholes? No. They had always been theorised to be possible – dimensional conduits to other realms. Elliott had even developed his own ideas for the magic for it, but he wasn’t able to test it. Not with the small matter of the dimensional barrier around Earth.
He had spent years trying to find a way past that barrier, and now, someone had the power to break through.
He had an inkling of how they’d managed that, but they had specifically created a wormhole right into the room he was in. It was targeted, for sure. He had no doubt about that. Whoever it was wanted him and they were very skilled in magic. Definitely as skilled as him. Perhaps even more so.
He needed to find that someone. If they could break past the barrier and summon him, what else might they know? Perhaps they might have the answers he’d been seeking for a century.
“Status,” he said. A screen appeared a few inches from his face, much like the one he was used to on Earth, though the information was marginally different.
Elliott Carpenter
Faction: Unaffiliated
[Class: Undefined]
Coin: 0 G 0 S 0 B 0 C
[STR: 23,441,416]
[AGI: 22,614,964]
[DUR: 28,512,237]
[STA: 25,713,892]
[DEX: 31,625,144]
[MAN: 34,513,567]
He stared at the screen with the slightest confusion. He wasn’t one to pore over his stats all day, so he wasn’t sure if they were the same but other than his name, the other information at the top wouldn’t have been on his status screen on Earth. He was sure of that. Especially that title. It was a moniker he had earned back home and he had done little, if anything, to discourage its use. Fear was a potent weapon. It had never been linked back to his real identity, however.
It didn’t matter anyway. He had far more pressing concerns.
“I have no money,” he said.
“Me neither,” Isabel replied.
“Inventory.”
The screen appeared but it was blank. Not a single slot. That was further proof this wasn’t Earth. Back home, he had hundreds of slots, filled with consumables, weapons, loot he hadn’t had a chance to get appraised or drops he hadn’t had the chance to transfer to his vault.
But now, nothing. No coin. No trinkets. No weapons, clothes or drops. He hung his head a little at the thought of losing all of that hard work. The bosses he had defeated in the dungeons, the competition he had erased and taken from, the wealth he had accumulated over a century and a half of System rule on Earth. All gone.
Or perhaps not.
Inventory on Earth worked via Spatial magic, linking the storage held elsewhere with his System command. It wasn’t beyond reason that his inventory still existed on Earth but there was no way to access it. The absence of slots entirely suggested this was a completely different inventory system and he just hadn’t had the chance to buy the storage yet.
He perked up, a thin smile on his face. Isabel raised an eyebrow at him.
“Opportunities, my friend. Opportunities.”
This was a whole new world to explore. A whole new world to conquer. He’d done it once. He could do it again. In a fraction of the time, now he no longer needed to level. And most importantly, he knew the barrier around Earth could be bypassed. He really needed to find the one who had done that.
“Can I ask a question?” Rose asked, standing a few feet behind them.
Isabel’s eyes flashed with more than a little annoyance. Elsie turned around to look at Rose and the girl’s eyes widened with fear, no doubt remembering what Elsie had done to the other S ranks that came to his office.
The girl was a bit of a problem, however. He didn’t strictly need her, but he hadn’t decided what to do with her just yet. He ignored her for now and continued to get an understanding for the System here.
“Skills.”
A list of his abilities appeared over hundreds of pages, with diagrams for directing the mana flow into the required sigils. All the abilities he had acquired over the years. At least they’d carried over. There were just too many to memorise. He knew the big ones of course, but it was some of the smaller ones that he’d forgotten over time.
“Quests.”
He had no quests – no surprise there.
“Map.”
No map either. That one probably needed him to buy a map scroll and consume it, similar to how it worked on Earth.
“Look,” Rose said, “can you tell me wh–”
Isabel drew her axe and swung it to within a centimetre of Rose’s face, forcing a rush of air that swept over them like a hurricane. Rose closed her eyes, flinching as her green hair whipped back, flapping in the wind, her silk dress tugging against her figure. Several nearby mounds flew through the tunnel and plastered the surrounding walls.
“Child,” Isabel said, her husky voice low and clear. “My master is a patient man. I am not. I firmly believe in knowing one’s place. Would you like to know yours?”
Elliott half expected the lower half of the girl’s dress to darken, but she surprised him, lifting her head and meeting Isabel’s glare. There was a slight tremble in her body and a nervousness in her eyes, but she stood her ground. The girl had fight in her. Good. He could use that.
“Put it away, Isabel.”
She didn’t hesitate, re-harnessing the axe and turning away from the girl. Elliott cast another spell.
[Echo]
The pulse of mana spread out from him in both directions of the tunnel, flowing over the mounds and the water without disturbing them, travelling along the arched ceiling a few feet above their heads. He waited for the feedback. There. Several hundred metres away in one direction. An opening in the ceiling. He waited some more. The echo pinged back from the other direction, several hundred metres further than the first. A larger opening at the end of the tunnel leading into a flowing body of water.
He faced Rose.
“Miss Reese,” he addressed her. Isabel’s eyes flicked imperceptibly in his direction, surprised at his politeness most likely. He was perfectly capable of acting the gentleman when the occasion called for it. The occasion rarely called for it, but that was hardly his fault.
“In case you haven’t figured it out yet, somebody has broken through the dimensional barrier surrounding Earth and brought us to…” Elliott gestured at the surroundings, “…to wherever here is. Now, I am willing to allow you to join us, if you can do as you’re told and speak when spoken to. Or, you can go your own way.”
Elliott turned his back on her, and started walking towards where he’d felt the opening in the ceiling, lifting one leg after the other through the slop beneath his feet. He wondered if he had any cleaning spells in his [Skills] list. He’d have to check. Isabel followed alongside him and Elsie was by his waist, as ever.
“Why would you let me join you when I came to kill you?”
“For much the same reason that I don’t crush spiders in my home.” He looked over his shoulder at her. “They present no threat to me, and they have their uses. Can you make yourself useful?” He gave her a wink and continued on. Only the soft splash of water answered as they made their way towards that opening in the ceiling. A moment later, he heard Rose shout, the echo of her voice bouncing off the walls around them.
“And you won’t kill me?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“You.”