Chapter 58 – Friend or Foe? (Patreon)

Luke was committed to venturing deeper into the Gordian. He had one sealing rune down, and many more to go.

There was no telling how many more platforms he had to fix, or if the other sections had the same layout. He didn’t have time to check every single hallway.

It’s really too bad I don’t. I wouldn’t mind exploring every nook and cranny of the Gordian dungeon, Luke thought.

Just counting the few he came across, there were 5 different paths he could have taken. Maybe they would have led to traps, or maybe they led to something else. Luke wasn’t sure.

He wanted to fully roam the Gordian. The creator’s scribbles, however, warned against attempts to map or fully explore it.

It was unplottable, a magical countermeasure on the Gordian that caused it to reorder and shift itself if too much of its design was discovered.

If that occurred, it would make Luke’s task significantly harder to complete.

Which meant that Luke had to keep going as deeply as he could with the same path that he took rather than fully exploring the other hallways.

A small part of himself wanted to keep the Gordian and hoped he would have the opportunity. If he could enter it at will, then he could fully roam it. Even if that ended up being impossible, it would mean a dungeon that constantly reordered itself with threats and dangers.

Which sounded like the perfect training companion.

Once he was fully rested, Luke got to his feet and paced around the room. He had stripped the room bare of anything useful and anything that could be used for flux.

All that remained was the platform that, if he stepped on it, would take him back to his refuge and the large pool of electric-blue water at the center of the room.

Knowing what would happen if he ventured onto the platform already, Luke peered into the pool.

Is this really just a dead end? Luke thought.

It was so blue he couldn’t see very deep. But he did have two pieces of thurskite equipment that made him swim faster. He liked the idea of testing them out, despite his misgivings.

Luke had never been a very good swimmer, but he was at least adequate. Now was the time to see just how far his stats and his equipment could take him.

Taking out the ratking’s dagger, Luke slipped into the pool.

Aside from the oddly blue tinge to the water, there was nothing different to him. His visibility was much less, his enhanced senses didn’t penetrate the blue murk as far as he would have liked.

His shadow senses were muted while submerged. He didn’t know if it was something to do with water, or just the lack of shadows. The water had its own light. A faint nimbus of blue illuminated the surrounding water around him.

Given the power of the Gordian, it could have been anything.

Just as Luke thought to orient himself and begin swimming down into the pool, the water moved out of his way. Displacing the water in front of him caused him to shoot forward like a fish.

He moved fast. Far quicker than mere stats should have allowed. Granted, he had gained a considerable amount from fighting that thurskite. It took time to adjust to monumental changes like that.

Luke hardly had to do anything. It felt like moving his arms and kicking his feet was more for show than actual utility.

After several seconds, Luke started to get worried about his oxygen, when he realized that he wasn’t even lightly strained by holding his breath. He supposed that might be one of the perks of Vitality and Fortitude.

Just to be safe, Luke twisted around and shot up through the water. He landed lightly on the edge of the pool without meaning to. He had intended to poke his head above water, take a deep breath and go as deep as he dared.

“I guess both pieces of equipment are doing their thing,” Luke said to the empty room, looking down at the [Thurskite Scalemail] and [Thurskite Trousers] he was wearing.

For a moment, he expected someone to say something in reply. He even looked up and saw no one there. It used to be so normal to be around other people.

He shook his head at himself. He was alone and would be for a long time. He had to remind himself that it was safer that way, even if it did feel a little hollow.

It would be nice to have someone to talk to every once in a while, Luke admitted to himself. A base to come back to every now and again.

Luke dropped back into the water, his lungs full of precious air. It took him half the time it did before to reach the same depth. Once he reached it, he kept going.

Once he was deep enough, the nimbus of light vanished. He was left in a magical darkness that was surprisingly difficult to push through. He had to rely on his muted shadow senses to perceive the world around him.

Not that there was much to see. It was a stone tube filled with water.

There was a gradual curve in the tube that told him he was now traveling parallel to the floor above.

For a moment, he started to get panicky about how long he was swimming without breathing, but his body kept going without complaint.

Is it my Fortitude or Vitality? Or maybe my Endurance?

While Endurance did make the most sense, Luke would have loved to test it. Even the many books he read didn’t touch on stats very much beyond the ones that a Runegraver needed: Willpower, Arcane, Dexterity, Perception, and Wisdom.

Each one was useful, but the first three were the most important.

Without Willpower, he couldn’t impart intention and power to the rune. Arcane was necessary to give the rune an adequate amount of strength. Dexterity was required to write a legible rune.

Perception and Wisdom assisted the other 3 stats. There were supposedly ways around MP limitations of individuals with low mana, but Luke found it much easier to keep his Wisdom high to avoid that hurdle.

Life was hard enough without more obstacles.

Luke lost himself in the murky depths. The first few minutes passed without hardly any awareness and Luke realized he had to be swimming several times faster than he had ever been able to before.

He would have been winded after a few laps at the pool back home, but darting through the water like a fish was effortless.

It was fun too. Having superhuman abilities is awesome, Luke thought.

With a silent praise for the thurskite’s equipment, Luke darted through the water as the minutes went by. Only after Luke had counted 7 minutes did he start to worry about his oxygen.

By then, a faint burning sensation was filling his chest. He managed to keep panic at bay, doing his best to remain calm in the darkness.

At minute 10, Luke was getting worried.

He was long past the point of no return. If he tried to swim back, he would surely drown. His lungs were on fire. His limbs were thick and slow, like bags of wet sand. Luke urged them forward, relying on sheer willpower to get the job done.

This really was not the way Luke wanted to go. Fighting a monster, sure. But drowning? Nope, that unpleasantness was up there with zombies.

Two minutes later, Luke wished he had turned around and gone down another hallway instead of diving into the mystery pool. He was committed, and he had to remind himself far more than he would have liked about that.

A rush of bubbles burst from his nose. Luke’s head was spinning. There was no panic. He felt cold. Drained. The magical enchantment of his thurskite armor was all that propelled him as his tunnel vision darkened and narrowed.

He realized he would never see Emma again. As unlikely as it was, it would have been nice, just once.

Luke could almost hear her warm voice, urging him to go just a little further. He never understood why she left him. They had such a good thing going. There was talk of marriage, kids, the whole American Dream was within his grasp.

And then, out of the blue, she dumped him. Told him never to contact her again and cut all ties. None of her friends knew what was going on. She had no parents that he could go to as an in-between.

She had almost literally dropped off the face of the Earth, taking his heart with him.

Cold air washed over him and his thoughts spiraled into depths of despair that he hadn’t allowed himself to get trapped in for nearly a year.

It took Luke a moment to realize he wasn’t surrounded by the pressure of the water.

He choked down deep lungfuls of air. Spots danced behind his eyelids. For a moment, he could faintly feel Dunamis all around him, floating like glowing motes of dust. And then the clarity of the cosmic energy slipped away from him.

His eyes burned as he opened them to look at the bizarre room around him. Like the previous one, it was massive. While the room with the thurskite was largely destroyed, this was one was well-appointed and looked lived in.

There were eight sides to the room with a domed roof of glass overhead showing an alien sky. Not the same one that he had seen from a window previously, he was sure of it.

This looked as if he was actually out in space surrounded by the stars. There was no light pollution, no atmosphere to speak of dulling the cold harsh light of the stars in their multitudes.

Situated in three tiers, the room rose up and out with stairs cut through where each of the 8 sides joined together.

Luke’s oxygen-starved brain struggled to understand what he was looking at. Even without Luke’s shadow senses there was enough starlight to see by, but it took him a few more moments for the word to percolate to the forefront of his mind: library.

This was a massive library and, unless he missed his guess, a workshop as well.

The main octagonal floor at the center of the room was filled with tables, various tools, unfinished scraps of paper, opened books, the whole works.

It was like the workshop in the refuge, only on a massive scale. And surrounding the workshop on all levels were bookshelves crammed full of thick tomes.

After catching his breath, Luke ventured forward carefully, keeping an eye out for traps. He wanted to dig into all the materials and see what sort of things he could collect, but since this was within the Gordian dungeon, it could easily be trapped.

The first table he came across had a similar magnifying setup as the table in the refuge. Luke peered at the schematics, recognizing the rune the previous occupant was working on.

“What happened to you?” Luke asked aloud, thinking of the Runegraver who originally made the Gordian dungeon.

“Are you speaking to me?” asked a cultured voice from behind one of the bookshelves on the second level.

Luke’s shock didn’t stop him from drawing a knife from his belt as the man came around to the stairs with a bundle of books in his hands.

“Oh, hello.” His purple irises took in the weapon in Luke’s hand. “My, hostile aren’t we?”

Luke stared at the man, speechless. While he was prepared to fight, he wasn’t mentally prepared for any sort of conversation. How long had it been since he last talked to a living person? Suddenly, he couldn’t think of a single word to say.

Dressed in rich silks and velvets, the man looked like a mage fresh out of a story. His high cheekbones and pointed ears marked him out as an elf, and his pale skin told Luke he was used to spending long hours indoors.

He walked right past Luke bearing his burden, completely unconcerned with Luke’s dagger pointed at him. The elf dropped the stack of books on a nearby table that looked more recently used than all the others.

Turning to Luke, he held out a beringed hand. “Name’s Alfair.”