Arcanist In Another World-Chapter 44: Brackley

Grey morning time, a terrible cold outside, the wheels of the carriage creaking, and Valens sat there by the window, peering out into the dreary skies with a hand propped under his chin. Teary eyes from the sharp winds. Not much of a relief for the string of sleepless nights, but he guessed it was as good a remedy as any.

The carriage was packed with a variety of smells, soot, and ashes, some sweat in the mix, dried blood, and the stench of the Ironmanes snorting through the morning fog, terribly efficient at keeping the wheels rolling. They never tired, which turned the compartment into a cage of sorts that kept them huddled tight inside.

You have to learn to live with your demons.

Valens sighed. It was one thing reminiscing about the old lessons but another to practice them without his Master holding a stick up his back. He felt his absence like a collapsed lung, bothering him at each breath, reminding him of his shortcomings. The worst part, there wasn’t a solution. A Lifesurge couldn’t fix what appeared to be a metaphorical reminder of his sins.

Nomad would’ve told him to carry on. He did just that, albeit he could use some time away from the object of his nightmares. She lay round the back caught in dark dreams, arms sprawled around her long, black hair, mouth curled into a deep frown, skin looking baby soft and smooth without any blemishes.

I’ve fixed her, haven’t I?

Which was all the more reason why it didn’t make sense that he still felt this way. Then again, she did flinch whenever she came too close to him, and not once Valens could catch her eyes with his own. Somehow, the young woman knew he’d be looking at her, so she kept her chin low and gaze nailed to her feet.

She’s scared but grateful. Happy, yet afraid. Am I the reason for all of those things, or just the bad ones?

Had she known anything about the shadow that took her in the first place, perhaps she could’ve given him an explanation. A clue to work with. Anything that would be mildly useful to keep Valens’s mind occupied. But amnesia was a bastard of a sickness to come across, and the fix was a long, arduous process, not to mention in this primal world.

What do you want, exactly? To tell you she wasn’t the innocent, pitiful girl you think she is? That she purposefully did the ritual? That she wanted to kill that Lady and her sons for this so-called Mother of Venerable Fates?

Looking at her face now, cheek flattened out over the hardwood, hair dancing at each puff of her breath, a part of Valens thought that it wasn’t likely that the woman could’ve had a wicked quality to her.

Everybody lies.

That was a lesson well learned, and he was no exception.

“Brackley.” Garran scrunched his nose at the line of single-story wooden shacks ahead, barely visible through the long windows, hastily built and poorly maintained, a haphazard collection of shelters promising to break at the first storm. They clung to the edges of a mountain looming over them like a deep, long shadow, surrounded by a network of railways and mule paths winding through the settlement. “Always on the verge of collapse, but too damn stubborn to give in. I hate the pit towns.”

“Spend a night in the mines. Then you’d learn to appreciate it,” Mas said sourly. He had a frown that never quite left his lips since the trouble they had with Valens some nights before, but under the captain’s looming grace, he’d learned to deal with it. At least for now. “There are good men here. Doing God's work. Hard but honest work. You wouldn’t know.”

“I’m willing to take the chance,” Garran snorted. “Get a few of them if you like, have them face a Wailborn. Then we can speak of hard, honest work.”

“Filthy business to be born into. Goes round the family if you’re cursed with fate. Never worth the pay, either. You’re either going to get the Hack with all that smoke or die before you’ve got a chance to get sick,” Marcus said as he gazed across the town. He’d been awfully silent on the road, but in the last day or two, he seemed to have suddenly gotten better.

“Can’t be worse than a shadow’s kiss,” Garran scoffed at him. “Ever felt the icy, slimy lips of a Wailborn? I take working deep in some mountain to catch a few manastones to being haunted by a ghost that has a thing for you, I tell you that.”

“She was a handful,” Captain Edric chuckled. “Her charming smile didn’t seem to work against the Wraithspike, though.”

Valens had half the mind to focus on their conversation, but he was also interested in the sight that welcomed them to this town called Brackley. There were railways with trams hauled over them, some with low-sided, open-topped metal compartments or wooden carts—rugged machines favoring a utilitarian design.

Tracks seemed to have been forged from iron or steel. Certainly a cheaper option than having an Earth Mage forge the parts with condensed mana, topped by spell formulae against aging, but ultimately worse in prolonged use.

“What are those flickering things?” Valens poked Celme with the tip of his elbow, waking her from her daydreams. She came to herself with a weary sigh, then squinted at the trams. “Stones? Rocks? Gravel for use? Or some ore that’s catching the light?”

“Those are manastones,” Celme said, looking at him doubtfully as ever. “Wide in use and always short in supply.”

“Manastones?” Valens scowled at the mention of it. “Stones filled with mana? And they’re naturally found in mines?”

That had to be a twisted joke on Celme’s part, and Valens didn’t so much as crack a lip at it. He just gave her a pointed look. He then felt the gemstones stitched into his thigh or whatever was left of them. Most of them were empty, and he was meaning to try and see if he could fill them with ambient mana, but this… This made him feel funny in a not-so-humorous way.

“Yes,” Celme said tiredly. “They’re used in engines. In lamps. In every little thing you’d normally see in a city. You’ve seen the Riftshard, haven’t you? That’s a manastone as well, one with infinitely more mana stored inside. Those ones are used in Gates or to make Magical Artifacts.”

“I’m sorry,” Valens said shakily. “I have trouble digesting the utter nonsense you’ve just spat out of your mouth. Once I’m done with it, I’ll get back to you.”

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This is not fair. We’ve been lied to, Master, we’ve been deceived and tricked by none other than our Mother Nature! They have it good here, have it too good that I’m about to bleed out of my nose. What heresy, what madness!

Valens took in a set of breaths to calm his thumping heart, and when it didn’t work, he reached for Apathy to make sure he wouldn’t scream out of his lungs in this damned carriage. But then, he had every right to do so because if there was a god-like being behind this world, then it was painfully unfair that Valens’s world had been cursed with a Mage who had decided to seal the Void rather than grant them all the mana in existence.

The implications alone sent a shiver down his spine. Mana pool was a marvel, true, nestled deep in one’s chest and waiting to spill forth at a basic thought to become a spell. Yet the ambient mana remained silent whenever Valens tried to reach it. He could feel it all over his body but couldn’t for the life of him touch it or make it listen to his commands.

But these things… If they worked like gemstones, then there was nothing he couldn’t do with them in hand. Valens had to spend a fortune back in the Empire to get a few empty gemstones, and yet here they were, digging them out of the dirt.

Easy. Long, deep breaths. Take three.

Taking them one by one, he settled back to a calm rhythm and felt around the Resonance. It was a chorus of frequencies dancing across the settlement, some tunes spiking, some others lively and wild. He could see some brick buildings looming high behind the wooden shacks, these ones looking a touch more diligent in design and undoubtedly maintained by occasional repairs. Most had two or three stories built in place, but one had a pointy tower stretching high over the rest of them, topped with a golden sword that gleamed with internal light.

That’s a church?

It painted a stark picture against the character of the land, as most religious buildings had the habit of doing so. A light shining in the midst of ever growing darkness, and this one was shaped like a sword. If not for Apathy, Valens would’ve scoffed at the sight of it.

“And why are we here, if I may ask, captain?” he said with a curious look, hoping to get an answer this time. The last few days had been spent in disturbing silence, the sacred warriors taking turns for each night as others mostly slept in loud, thumping snores.

“We’ve been called by the local church.” Captain Edric gazed out of the windows with a tight-lipped smile. “Either a shadow or a curse. Can be an ominous find in the depths of the mine. A dead man’s corpse, rotten and broken under a rockslide, remained there just long enough to turn into a nest fit for a venomous shadow. It’s often the case with these little mining towns.”

“At least this one’s going to be a man.” Garran scratched at his stubble, nudging his chin toward Selin who was sleeping at the back. “Dead or alive, or taken by shadows, women are always complicated creatures. Dead men, though, now they know what they want but are too stupid with their ways to take it.”

“Must’ve caught the bastard already. Look.” Mas pointed with a hand toward the settlement, where men lounged lazily around the wooden shacks, faces smeared and riddled with ash marks. “They don’t look too bothered.”

“Then it’d be a quick stop.” Captain Edric smiled a true smile this time. “A day or two in the town, then we can make it to the capital.”

“Right,” Garran said. “We have a cargo to deliver.”

“Can you not?” Celme pursed her lips at him.

“What?”

“Can you stop treating her like she’s a Damned? You’ve seen her these last few days. Valens was right. The shadow’s not there anymore,” Celme said strongly. Her Berserker side slowly returned as they closed in on the capital. Or, Valens rather thought, it never left her, but she’d purposefully kept it leashed.

Certainly a clever thing to do. There are no beasts here for her to punch through and for me to relieve my weight. Can’t believe I missed that Rift.

“How charming,” Garran said. “Fine, you can keep your little pet, but don’t come running to me when she tries to bite you.”

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“Prick.”

“You—“

“We’re here,” Captain Edric said as the carriage came to a stop, holding a hand out to Garran. “Get them to the inn and fix some clothes for the group. I’ll come fetch you tomorrow.”

“What?” Garran blanked. “You want me to stay in the inn? I’m not coming to church?”

“Someone has to keep an eye on that woman, and I don’t intend on leashing an angry dog by their doors. Mas will stay with me, and Dain… Well, you know how he is. Not the brightest of our Order, eh, Garran? I’m counting on you.”

“But Captain—“

Captain Edric trudged off the carriage with Mas in tow, the zealous bastard paying his respects with a biting glance at Valens before he got out.

“My cursed luck,” Garran breathed, gesturing with a finger at Valens and his company. “Out.” He mumbled to himself as Valens and others exited the carriage. “Wish I’d been a fool, but then I couldn’t have tolerated myself. Being somewhat of a genius doesn’t help, either. What have I done to deserve this?”

Valens’s bare feet crunched over the solid ground, a soot-filled wind welcoming him with a slap on his cheeks. It was painfully cold outside in the square, scarcely populated by miners and a few working women, kept somewhat clean for a town that was all about mining.

It was a different practice here, Valens soon found, as the Empire only mined for particularly precious ores like gold and silver. Even those ones would often be regulated by Earth Magi, who had a complicated way of mining the ores that didn’t quite rely on heavy labor.

Why would you need men with pickaxes in this world?

As they trudged toward one of the few good-looking buildings, Valens found that most men here had the [Miner] class, and their levels were somewhere between forty and fifty. Each one looked strong like an ox, equally buff and filthy from tip to toe.

“It’s like a job, isn’t it?” Valens muttered as an angry Garran huffed his way through the square while Marcus carried Selin over his back. Celme looked at Valens as he continued, “The classes, I mean. Selin’s a Nursemaid, and these men are Miners. Will there be a Cook or, I don’t know, a Butler?”

Celme sighed at him tiredly. “What else would it be? Aren’t you the same? You’ve got a Class, and you do what’s right for you. Yours might be a special case, but still, you’re a Healer.”

“I guess?” Valens said. “Now that you mention it, there’s not much of a difference. However, I wonder if there’s a way to change it. I mean, what happens when someone decides to change their occupation? You can’t expect a Miner to be a, well, Miner all his life, right?”

“You can file an official request to the Department of Class Regulations if you want to change it. If they accept, and they don’t do that too often, then they’d give you a Cleansing. It’d rid you of all of your class skills and your class as well. You get to keep your stats, though.”

“All of life’s work, gone, just like that?” Valens was mildly horrified. “I can’t believe it.”

“That’s why you don’t choose your class until you’re of age,” Celme said.

“And you?” Valens asked. “You knew all along that you’d be a Berserker?”

Celme looked away. “It’s complicated.”

It sure is. Your system didn’t even give me a chance to pick a Class!

For whatever’s worth, though, it didn’t seem to affect him as he could use a variety of skills that didn’t quite fit with the moniker of a Healer. Valens guessed that’s where the ‘Arcane’ part of his class came into play, even if he didn’t entirely know what it meant.

Baby steps. You learn a new thing every day you’re alive, eh?

The first thing he planned to do when they got to the capital was to get a clear understanding of the structure. He also needed a place to work some things out, namely his spells and a few tests he decided to carry on with the spell formula. There was the trial nagging him still with more questions and the shadow’s words.

While the Captain and his Templars thought the shadow speech was a string of nonsensical words hissed out in whispers, Valens knew it wasn’t the case anymore, and it hadn’t been easy for him to come to that conclusion.

After all, who would’ve thought the shadows in this world speak the ancient language of the Empire’s Magi? That was a whole new mystery for him to decipher, and he had a mind to see the end of it.

Baby steps.

Right. There would come a time for everything, and tonight, it was time for him to take his first bath in this world.

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