Interlude 1: Hoodlums

Grabby sat in his room, thoroughly grounded, but uncaring. More, he thought about yesterday’s excursion. What they had done right, and what they had done very, very wrong.

–

“Okay guys, form up, Blue, you take middle, Smacks, you do backline with Murdoom, I will take front,” Grabby laid out for his friends.

“We’ll play this straight,” he promised, uttering a quick and simple spell.

“[Stick Form] [Highpoint Creates Light] [Solid Mana] [Retain Orientation] [Relative Position: Hand],” he spelled, the heat-haze of Thaumic Mana in front of him congealing into a glowing ethereal torch that hovered near his palm.

Of course, what the others heard was “Kuurk Shwiwiwing Whump Whirip Fwong”, uttered as quickly as possible from the burly Orc’s lips.

“I’ll handle utility. Smacks, long range violence, don’t get in close, you’re our walking artillery,” he ordered, pointing to the notorious hothead, who shook his head ruefully with a smile.

“Murdoom, You’ll have to take it old fashioned this time. If you can, channel some bolts to support Smacks,” he gestured to the Not-yet-Occultist, who was armed with a simple dagger and wooden buckler.

“Finally, Blue, you’re our heavy hitter. You know how to use that, right?” he asked, gesturing to the whip he had taken from his dad’s storage, a braided leather weapon, woven in physically impossible ways, until it was thinner and denser than leather had any right to be.

Blue nodded nervously, clutching the coiled hoop of death in both hands.

Grabby looked at the large cavernous entrance they planned on using to get into the Splintered Wreckage.

“We go in, see if Bigpig’s attack triggered any magical mishaps, collect anything neat we find, and get out,” he assured the group.

“Shame new kid didn’t want to come. We could have used those uhh…” Smacks tried to think of something the Ratling could be good for. “Well, you know!”

In truth, it would have mostly been fun to round out their group with a fifth.

“He could probably fit in the little gaps better than us,” Murdoom offered, getting a point of emphasis of Smacks, who nodded.

“Eh, nothing wrong with staying behind, this is a little… Intense,” Blue noted, as they formed in formation, and began delving into the maybe-partially-dungeonized area.

“Blue’s right. He needs more time before he’s ready for this,” Grabby said, the irony utterly lost on them all as they pushed aside a shattered pillar of nailed together wood, finding themselves in a large cavern.

“It’s dusty,” Murdoom warned, eyes sharp. The amount of dust down here was worrying, for reasons none of them quite elucidated, for risk of jinxing it.

Despite this, everyone took the warning to heart, and they slowed their advance into the wooden cavern that seemed ever so slightly too large.

To the side, Blue noticed something that made him freeze.

“Guys…” he pointed, and everyone looked at the simple chest sitting half-buried in splinters, perched on top of a suspiciously large piece of wood flooring.

The hair on the back of Grabby’s neck shot up. The chest, and the floor, were utterly clean of dust. Above, his torch glowed barely sufficiently to see the wet sheen of drool on the ceiling above. His eyes, and senses, noted how drained it was of mana.

The Dust, Mana, and Drool that should have been on the floor where that chest was were all gone.

“Treasure!” Smacks proclaimed, stepping forward. Grabby held him back by the shoulder.

“Wait, it might be a trap. Open it from here, use a blast in case it’s a monster,” Grabby requested.

Smacks’s brow furrowed. “Won’t that change what comes out of the chest? I’d rather take the risk to be honest…”

Still, he trusted his friend’s warning, and began moving his limbs.

He held one arm out stiff, twisting it and forming his hand into a knifehand pose, while with the other, he began performing a wafting motion, as if trying to wave air at it.

Once the flow of the motion was established, he dropped down to a knee, swinging the arm up and around, leaving behind a wooden, ghostly spear behind, which he snatched with the same spinning motion.

[Spear Arm Pose], [Flowing Wind Waft], [Water Balloon Drop of Eruption]

The pose, paired with the wafting arm and sudden drop, compressed mana through the pattern of his knifehand, stretching and bloating it into a structure longer than the limb would be on its own, creating a suitable Ki Weapon.

Smacks frowned. The problem with Martial Arts was its difficulty. The spear in his hand was strong. Stronger than anything Grabby could conjure with his Thaumic Mana, but it was simplistic.

Master Martial Artists could take years to weave Arts as complex as the ones Wizards and Mages could learn on their first day, with the correct study.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

He shook his head. It was worth it in the end. It would be, once he achieved his true goal.

With a heave, Smacks threw the Ki Spear at the chest, detonating a hole through it, which began spilling out…

Wrapped Pork Cutlets…

“Damn it Grabby, we should have had Murdoom open it, at least. He might have gotten some kind of… Boargon or something,” he barked. “We opened it wrong.”

Grabby looked down with a flush at the gaffe. He knew the risk, that the Chest, probably Abstracted by the dust, Mana, and chaos all around, didn’t have definite contents.

In a dungeon, everything was indistinct, undefined, until someone revealed it. One’s preconceptions, and the context surrounding something like a Chest or a Pot…

They forced the indistinct something inside of it to fully realize. A form of natural Alchemy that only occurred in places like this, where Dust, Magic, and the power of Sudden Chaos or Long Entropy caused the world to temporarily forget what actually existed.

Smacks finished gathering up the raw pork, shoving it in his backpack. “Bet I could have gotten a scroll, if I had just opened it normally,” he grumbled, pushing past his friend.

‘I wasn’t wrong to be wary, but he’s right too. I should have thought of a better way to handle this,’ he thought to himself.

He wracked his brain, even as the group started encountering genuine danger, in the form of Pigsprigs.

The small group of large, porcine creatures were made entirely of lumber, overgrown with curly pigtail plants, all of them soaked in Bigpig’s drool, and snuffling around for more of the Mana-charged, highly hostile liquid.

“Okay, let’s do this, like we planned!” Grabby exclaimed.

“[Stick Form] [Solid Mana] [Relative Position: Hand],” he barked out, summoning another Mana-branch, this one pointed out like a blade from his fingertip.

Running forward as the vanguard, Grabby flicked his wrist rapidly, the stick whipping around at speeds impossible for a normal, wielded branch.

Immediately, the attacks effects came through, the solid mana smacking into the wooden pigs with enough force to shatter both the mana, and the Pigsprig’s nose.

The creatures squealed in fury, descending on him. He began casting more spells, conjuring floating, handlocked sticks as a blend of both attack and defense, while his friends took pressure off of the burly Orc.

A whipcrack rang out first, Blue’s attack cleaving three of the pig-like monsters in half, killing them instantly.

After a silent moment of shock from everyone involved, this was followed by a Ki Spear that thunked into the side of another, damaging it heavily, and Murdoom channeling and attuning a dusty bolt of copper mana, which he flung at the same pig, blinding and bruising its green face.

Grabby stammered, the more they fought, trying to cast faster and faster, and failing more and more, as his spells grew distorted, and their effects more varied and less useful. Sticks formed distorted, or failed to hold tight to their positions relative to his hands.

Finally, it came to a head when a Pigsprig bit down on his hand, and only the sheer strength of his formerly Broken fingers saved him from a messy loss, as blood spattered over the wood, and the creature only seemed to grow yet more invigorated at the influx of bloody vitae.

Grabby roared, kicking the monster away before grabbing a plank in his good hand and smashing it over the beast’s head, struggling to summon more Mana-sticks as he did, while his friends supported from behind.

Before the remaining Pigsprigs could overwhelm him, Smacks dove in with a fresh Ki Spear, using the far more durable mana construct to smash apart the remaining foes.

They both breathed heavily, standing among the wreckage, but Grabby, holding his bleeding, half-bitten-through hand, was the one who came off the worst from it.

“Here, this is blood mana, mostly,” Smacks offered, holding up his spear and pressing the red butt of the weapon into Grabby’s hand.

Slowly, the solidified mana seeped into the wound, the Blood Vitality sealing his skin bit by bit. By the time the knobby end of the spear was evaporated into his hand, the wound was gone. Despite this, it wasn’t perfect.

One rule in all professions, there was no such thing as free healing.

The results of this were clear, as rather than clean skin, or pale scars, his hand was run through by thicker, larger blood vessels, and bright red skin.

The next time he was injured there, he would bleed even more. This was the cost of using Blood Mana to heal. Blood beget blood.

“S-should we call it here?” Blue asked. Grabby bit his tongue, thinking hard.

“...No, no, I’m fine. We can press further. I owe Smacks a treasure,” he said, giving his friend a smirk as the two shared grasped hands, slapped together to establish the moment of comradery.

The quartet pushed on, shoving open a door made of woven branches, revealing a room that wasn’t quite dungeon, nor was it quite normal. The destruction of Bigpig, as chaotic as it was, wasn’t a true Thaumic Collapse, and the ruined area hadn’t been left alone for centuries or decades to get dusty and old, so it made some sense.

There were hints of it. The floor was a bit too regular, as if it were meant to be walked on, and there were structures that looked a bit too much like doorways, but it was still clearly a wreck in all the ways that mattered.

What made this room fascinating, however, was the true treasure that was sitting there in the open.

A black point spearing into the floor, glowing with a Cherenkov-blue hue. One of the many Splinters that made up the foundations of Sunnymeat.

Unlike those, however, this one was incomplete. The deadly sharpness faded near the top of the Splinter, where it faded to merely dark wood. Even this would be fairly normal, if not for something that made the teens gape with excitement.

It looked like a sword.

“It’s even got a hilt!” Smacks exclaimed, pointing to the point where the black Splinter met the dark wood. A gnarled knot in the natural grain had formed a bulbous boundary between deadly, nigh-indestructible sharpness and strong, good wood.

It wasn’t loot from a dungeon, but a Splinter that was this perfectly shaped had to be fate.

Carefully stepping around the toothpick sized Splinter near it, spiked into the ground with an askew angle, as if it were awkwardly looking for a missing fifth member, Smacks drew the object from its wooden stone, hefting it high.

“Yeah, this’ll do,” he smiled aggressively, basking in the eager excitement of his friends.

Making their way back out of the wreckage, they encountered more monsters, but with Smacks’ new tool, they fell almost as easily as the ones whipped into annihilation by Blue using his dad’s weapon.

The Splinter wasn’t as destructive as the whip’s deafening cracks, but it was far, far sharper, more than capable of cleaving through wooden pig effigies with embered, crackling planes of ash where the blade practically vaporized what was in its path.

It was only at the exit where they encountered something that even the Splinter Sword couldn’t damage.

Their parents.

“...Gods damn it,” Smacks said, as his father held out a hand, tapping his foot impatiently for the technically illegal loot.