Chapter 59 - All That Hard Work

“Come on, sugar! Keep up!”
Thorne kept saying that. Lillia kept falling short of answering the call.
The Plains Tyrant Crown Lillia had gotten from the Ambusher in the first place made her fast over the plains. Scary fast.
Fast to the point of worrying what would happen if she tripped. Fast to the point where she worried her dress would ride too high during the run.
None of that speed allowed her to keep up with Thorne.
It was unclear whether Thorne’s prodigious alacrity was because of her status as a level 20 Huntsmaster or whether she had just always been like that. No matter what the answer was, she was revelling in the speed, and in the fact that Lillia couldn’t keep up.
By the time Lillia actually caught up with Thorne, she was tired; she was panting, and she was sweaty. The scaled, dark beast that Thorne had seen on the horizon was already dead. Several dozen arrows were sticking out of its side. Three of them were in each eye.
Thorne laughed as Lillia stumbled onto the scene. “Man, this makes it almost too easy.” She shook her head as the buzzing of her laughter faded. “Usually I got to worry about how many arrows I’m carrying, but—” She cut herself off by reaching over her shoulder. She pulled her hand back out with an arrow between her fingers. Thorne laughed again. She treated the trick as if it were novel every time.
It took Lillia a moment to catch her breath. By the time she was ready to speak, Thorne had already moved on to the next topic.
“Sorry, I ain’t leaving more of these for you, kid. It’s just too damn fun once I’m in the thick of it.”
Lillia offered a thumbs-up as a response. Thorne obviously thought that she was depriving Lillia, but one experience in the Hunting Grounds had been enough to turn her off killing for sport.
If there was something they needed in the room, that was another discussion. But hunting for the thrill of the hunt or fighting for the thrill of the fight? Lillia didn’t think she’d ever be keen on that.
Thorne looked around them, staring past Lillia and off over the horizon. She saw things Lillia couldn’t see. Her eyes turned a honey colour of gold.
She hadn’t explained what that ability did to Lillia. In fact, she hadn’t explained any of her abilities to Lillia. In the Huntsmaster’s words, it was more fun if she had to figure it out.
Lillia didn’t know how she was supposed to do that. She couldn’t track an arrow in flight, and by the time she reached a fight, the “monsters” were the equivalent of pincushions.
Thorne blinked, and all at once the golden glow of twilight stole the stage from daylight. The false sun, which had always hung high in the sky, was now far beyond the ceaseless horizon. Lillia spun, trying to understand how so much time had passed all at once. Thorne just sighed.
“Ah, think I got about one more hunt in me before it’s time to call it,” she said.
“How is it almost nighttime?” Lillia asked. Then came the perhaps more pressing question. “There’s nighttime in this dungeon?”
“Kind of.”
“I could have had a bedtime this whole time? I could have woken up to the sunrise? I could have—”
“Did you feel like camping?”
Lillia considered it. “Are there tents and bedrolls?”
“Nah.”
Lillia nodded. Frankly, even sleeping in a tent would have sounded like a nightmare a week ago. Now, she would have taken it over settling for the dungeon floor or the stone chair of the palace. “I just didn’t know this place had day and night.”
“The dungeon doesn’t. I do,” she said. “Keeps me from disappearing into the Hunting Grounds forever. Gotta be there in case some adventurers come along.”
“I’m the only adventurer in the dungeon,” Lillia said. “Unless you count Havoc.”
“Remember when I told you I was more like Rickshaw than Havoc?” Thorne said. “This is another way that is true. I got more dungeons to think about than this one. I’ve…” Thorne hopped, and her wings buzzed to catch her before she touched the ground.
She looked past Lillia and into the lands yonder. Her honey eyes shone for a moment.
“You sit here tight for a sec. I’ll be a minute.”
Thorne sped away. A golden glow radiated off her wings as she flew, but even that couldn’t keep her in sight for long.
At least she hadn’t asked Lillia to keep up this time.
After a few moments of waiting, Lillia sat down beside Thorne’s latest kill. She kept her distance to avoid the blood-soaked grass. As she waited in the calm twilight, she could hear flies buzzing around the meat Thorne had left behind.
Was she planning on coming back and using that for anything? Was the point of coming into the Hunting Grounds just to kill at random until night fell?
Maybe that was it. Maybe each room was supposed to teach Lillia something. The Lodge covered commoners. The Havoc’s archive had information about the trades. The Spellmite Challenge covered history. The Hunting Grounds taught her to hunt as a ruler should.
The siege taught her about war. Nennia would teach her to slay monsters. Eisel would…
By the logic she was walking through, Eisel would teach her about negotiation. Unfortunately for that lesson, Lillia had no plans on compromising with him anytime soon. If that meant she was disappointing the dungeon, it was far from the first time.
Lillia looked out to see if she could see Thorne. She couldn’t, and she swore it had gotten darker since the huntress had left.
Left alone in silence, Lillia found her hand drifting again and again to the clasp of the Usurper’s Cloak.
She knew someone who could help with that particular question. At least hopefully.
Even as Lillia whispered her name, the sound of it rang out across the plains as if she’d shouted it off the tallest cliff. The flies around the carcass scattered.
“Sorceready!”
Cathria landed in front of her, her staff pointed at the black carcass. She relaxed once she realized it was already dead.
“Sorceready?” Lillia asked.
“Can’t all be winners,” Cathria said as she turned back to see Lillia. Once she looked down and found the princess on the floor, she lowered herself. Her glass body cracked and groaned as she crossed her legs and sat to match Lillia.
“To what do I owe the pleasure, Princess? You have been quite busy the last couple of times you summoned me.” She looked over at the carcass. “I see the excitement’s already over.”
“I wasn’t even part of it.”
“Hm. I didn’t take your hobgoblin friend as a master of archery.” Cathria returned her attention to Lillia.
The idea of Havoc carrying a thin little bow did seem absurd. Though Lillia also imagined that there had to be hobgoblin archers. Unless they found bows dishonorable or had some other weird hang-up.
Either way, she had brought Cathria out for a reason in this quiet moment on the plains.
“What spells can you cast that aren’t just blowing things up?” Lillia asked.
Cathria chuckled. “A great many, my dear. I was not given the title of Archmage based exclusively on my explosive prowess.”
“I guess the better question is, how many could you cast for me?”
“Ah.” Cathria looked down. “A great deal fewer. In my time, battle mages had already spent centuries optimizing their offensive spells for speed. That optimization allows me to cast those spells before my time is up.”
“But?”
“Many utility spells are ritualistic castings that take place over hours or days. Unfortunately, I’ve learned that the moment I begin to cast a spell, my time is nearly up.”
“Could you identify something for me? An item?”
Cathria chuckled again. It was the kind of laugh a parent made when their child did something cute. She avoided sounding condescending despite it.
“I would barely classify identification as a spell.”
“Even if there’s something hidden?”
“If it couldn’t identify something hidden, the Identify spell would be just as useless as Introspect,” Cathria said.
Lillia understood that it was supposed to mean something. She nodded.
“And what was it you wanted me to identify, dear?”
Lillia tapped the clasp.
“Alright then.” Cathria got up on her knees and scooched over to Lillia. “Permission to touch, Your Highness?”
The question made Lillia feel oddly at home. “Yes.”
Cathria reached out and tapped her glass finger against the jewel in the center of the Usurper’s Cloak clasp. She stared deep into the item. Something glowed within her opaque glass eyes, but there was no colour aside from the black.
Cathria remained perfectly still as the seconds ticked past. The first crack appeared on the finger that was touching the amulet. It stretched up her hand, splitting into two at the wrist as it began to climb up the woman’s arm.
Lillia reached out and grabbed Cathria by the same wrist, resting her thumb on the split. Her skin was cold.
Of course it was; she was just glass, even if she were alive.
“I, Princess Lillia Ashvalin, name you Cathria, as my champion.”
The rose-gold light of Lillia’s Blessing danced over Cathria’s glass skin for a moment. The crack halted its spread, but it never receded.
Cathria blinked twice and dragged her hand away from the clasp around Lillia’s neck. As she sat back down, a horrid split tore down her torso, just beneath the surface.
“That, young princess, is a nasty little curse you picked up. A powerful item, mind you, but a nasty little curse.”
“What?” Lillia asked. As soon as she’d seen that there was a hidden effect to it, she knew that something was wrong, but her heart still felt hollow as Cathria spoke.
“It’s siphoning from you. It gave you experience all at once, but has been draining your progress since.”
“It got me to level four,” Lillia said. She didn’t know why she felt the need to defend the item, but it made the sting feel better.
“Which would have been a great boon at the time, but now that you’re making actual progress, it’s going to drag in more and more of your victory and feed it to whoever made this item. Do you know who that is?”
Lillia sat there on the plains for a while, failing each time she tried to open her mouth. The explanation came too close to touching the conversation she’d sworn secrecy about. Even trying to change the topic and bring up Eisel in another context brushed up against the edges of the promise.
Not rules, technically. A promise.
But it felt like a curse.
The same split that Lillia had massaged and tried to heal earlier shattered outward on Cathria’s hand, echoing through the entire thing and changing her overall color from matte black to a cloudy grey of cracked glass. The Archmage looked down with vague curiosity, as if it weren’t spelling her death, and sighed.
“If you were to summon me again, I could break the curse shackling that item to you. It would restore some of the experience to you, but not nearly all of it. Right now, anything you defeat will continue to contribute more to their growth than yours.”
Guilt sat hot in Lillia’s stomach. It wasn’t fair guilt. She couldn’t remember deciding at all. All of a sudden she’d just been shaking Eisel’s hand. The embarrassment and guilt were there nonetheless.
A deep crack within Cathria’s core stole Lillia’s attention back.
“Cathria, what level should I be?”
“What level are you?”
“Ten.”
“And you’ve been wearing that since you were level…”
“Four.”
Cathria nodded, her head threatening to come off as she did. Glass rained down from each crack along her skin. Her time was up.
“Thirty.” With that last revelation, Cathria laid back down and broke into the grass. Lillia stared at the glittering remains before they faded away.
The back of Lillia’s throat was tight. She felt hot bile in her stomach as it churned.
Thirty?
Lillia failed to hold anything back. She fell forward onto her hands and knees. She threw up.
It was very un-princess-like.
Lillia coughed up spit and the last of the vomit in her mouth. She heaved over the grass.
THIRTY?
Havoc’s room, a tutorial level, had scrolls that required twenty levels. She was still fighting things that were much stronger than she was supposed to face. She had conquered an entire siege.
Well, fought an entire siege as a conqueror, but she digressed.
How much was each of those towers supposed to be worth? How much experience was Cathria supposed to offer during the second fight?
Lillia felt like she was going to throw up again, but nothing came. After all, there wasn’t anything truly inside her. While she’d been satiated by resting, she hadn’t eaten for days.
Gods.
It wasn’t just the level. It was knowing that she’d been feeding Eisel all of her experience from her hard work. When Lillia had been fighting and dying over and over again, he’d been stealing the credit.
All of this, and she’d just been making him stronger.
Oh, fuck.
Eisel was obviously at a higher level than Lillia if he ran off levels at all, so she probably hadn’t fed him twenty levels, but…
If Cathria was right about the ratio, it didn’t matter how much Lillia tried to fight and prepare for a battle against him. She might pick up an extra dress or two, but no matter how much she grew, he would grow more.
“Hey! Sugar, I—”
Thorne caught up with her own call after she saw Lillia on her hands and knees. The bee woman crouched beside the princess and placed a hand on her back.
“Ain’t got the stomach for hunting, do ya? Embarrassing, but it happens to some of us. Never ran into it myself, but—”
“No, it’s not that,” Lillia corrected.
It was so much worse.