Chapter 19: Chapter 19

With a sigh, Riven dropped his backpack to the ground and landed on his ass next to Athela with a grunt. Shaking his head and scratching, he sniffed. The food just smelled too enticing to leave alone, and even though he was still covered in blood, he really didn’t give a shit. He plucked a grape from a nearby plate and began to chew.

It was goddamn delicious.

With an eager smile, he scooped up the flat plate next to the glistening pool of water and began to devour the food like he’d never eaten before. He’d been stressed and overwhelmed up until this point, and he was surprised to find a single tear trickling down his face as happiness bloomed from a stupid smile while he chewed. “Jesus, this is good…”

That earned him a small laugh from Hakim as the other man sat next to him and picked up a plate of his own. “Good enough to cry over, eh?”

“Shut up.”

The two of them shared a grin and then burst into laughter, feeling relieved and relatively safe while knowing they had another three days of peace before more craziness unfolded. As they stuffed their faces, the family of three nearby eventually sat down to eat as well…though a little more hesitantly than Hakim had. They were still traumatized after what’d happened and even sat at a small but comfortable distance from the two men while they talked in hushed voices or occasionally shot Riven, Athela, and Hakim glances.

“Don’t worry about them,” Hakim said cheerfully in a hushed whisper of his own while he tore the loaf of bread on his plate in half and shoved some of it into his mouth. Licking his fingers, he burped and smiled politely Riven’s way. “They’re just shaken. I would be, too, if I was them. They’ll come around.”

Riven nodded, absent-mindedly chewing on a slice of smoked meat, which he assumed to be ham, and taking a moment to swallow. “Yeah. That was rough, and I don’t blame them for wanting to be somewhat alone. You doing okay, by the way?”

“Yeah, just a few deep bruises, but I’ll be fine.” Hakim patted his stomach and leaned back, taking in a long breath of air and exhaling slowly. Looking up to the rays of starlight leaking through the holes in the cave roof, he seemed to relax. He was also very respectful concerning Riven’s story and his minion, not pushing the subject at all and waiting for Riven to be the one to open up about it. So instead, he asked about something else.

“Now that we’re here in this odd situation, what craft are you going to take up?”

Riven chuckled, setting his plate to the side and cracking his fingers before downing a swig of chilling water. “You seem to be adapting to it rather fast compared to most of the others back in the field. As for a craft? No idea. Prophecy sounds really neat, but I don’t know how that’s supposed to be a crafting class. Do you craft prophecies? I’m not sure how that’d even work.”

“There’s always that book the system talked about you could take a look at.”

“Yeah. At the very least, I’ll take a look and get a better idea of how it works. It’d be very useful, that’s for sure…” Riven turned his head to look at his bloodstained bag, then stuck a hand inside and pulled out the white vase with black flowers again. He spun the vase around in his fingers, curiously observing the ceramic craftsmanship for some time before speaking. “Though…I may actually take a brief glance at totem making as well. Not sure what that’s about, but it sounds interesting. Hell, who knows, maybe this thing is a totem and I just don’t know it.”

“TOTEM MAKING?!” Hakim let out a bellowing laugh, truly amused, but bent over and extended a hand. “That’d be a long shot if it was. A vase doesn’t come to mind when I think of the word totem. Mind if I see that?”

Riven nodded and handed it over, gently placing it in Hakim’s outstretched palm. “I have no idea what it is, but I got it in a pretutorial event that was pretty brutal, and I think the vase is valuable. When I identify it, it comes up with ‘Strange Ceramic Vase’ and a bunch of question marks. Are you able to get any other information when you try?”

Hakim slowly shook his head, turned it around, and tried removing the lid—but failed as well. Then he handed it back to Riven with a grunt. It was also quickly obvious that he considered Riven’s talk about the pretutorial event as a green light to talk about how he’d come to get his head start. “I get the same message. You’ll have to tell me about that pretutorial event sometime; I’m curious. I thought the tutorial was the beginning for all the people in our group, but you already had a class before you arrived. I went straight from the gym to whatever world we’re in now…I hope my family is okay. I don’t talk to them much anymore, but I can’t help thinking about them if this is happening to other people around the world. Oh, and what about guilds? The system talked about guilds for like half a second and then didn’t speak of it again.”

Then before Riven could get out a response, Hakim pointed to the ivory dragon-depicting amulet around Riven’s neck. “What does that do? I can’t identify that, either.”

Riven considered the question and shrugged, palming the circular pendant that hung around his neck, and looked into the emerald eyes of the carved dragon. “Neither can I. I took it off a dead guy when we were forced to fight to the death at the end of the trial.”

Hakim’s eyebrows raised. “That happened? You don’t think we’ll be forced to do that here, do you?”

Riven let out a curt laugh. “No, I don’t think that’ll happen here. The event I got this class from had selected over fourteen hundred people that met some sort of hidden requirements, and only fifty of us made it out alive. I guess I just got lucky, but this tutorial we’re sharing right now seems more geared toward preparing us for what’s to come…and doesn’t seem like it’s designed to cull the people participating like that first event did.”

“There were more than fourteen hundred of you? And only fifty made it out?”

Riven nodded again, but he wanted to change the subject and lifted the cup to his lips again. “Yeah. It was brutal. So…I’ve gotta ask. What do you make of all this?”

Riven waved his hand around the room, settling his gaze on Athela, who was munching on some meat to his right. “Magic, demons, a tutorial event teleporting us around, and some kind of system intervening to bring people from all over the world into one of many thousands of groups. At least that’s what I assume given our tutorial group was labeled ‘Earth Origins, section 239,342.’ I got a quest, of all goddamn things, to finish that event just before the tutorial, and the very first notification I ever got on those weird holograms talked about not only magic—but miracles and martial arts, too. Doesn’t this all seem a little bit crazy?”

Hakim shifted his posture while sitting on the floor and hunched a little more—flexing his muscles while the tribal tattoos on his arms rippled under the minor exertion. He wore a perplexed frown, and eventually he shook his head and placed his wooden plate of food on the floor in front of him. “I do not know, nor do I attempt to understand it. I am very surprised this is all happening, but it’s rather refreshing in some ways. In other ways, it scares me. The old world was mildly boring, but at least it was comfortable. It was safe. I don’t know what we’re going to be facing or where we’ll even be going after all this is said and done. What’s the purpose? Is this God intervening in our lives? Or is it some other force that we know nothing about?”

Hakim shook his head and let out a deep sigh with a heave of his broad shoulders. “Frankly, it is beyond me, or any of us, really. I’ll just roll with the punches and do my best to live a happy life while I’m still breathing. What about you? You seem to be getting on well with magic this early.”

Riven snorted with contempt—though it wasn’t directed at Hakim, rather, the contempt was directed at the system that’d brought him into the first set of trials at the beginning. “Getting on well is one way of putting it. But yes, I agree. Not sure what to make of it all. Athela—do you know what’s going on here?”

The large red-and-black spider quickly shot him a glance before turning back to her meal and gobbling down more food. Between mouthfuls and low hisses of delight, she scrunched up her shiny legs and let out a hybrid burp-hiss. “Your world is being integrated into the system.”

“The system?” Hakim asked, eyebrows raising.

“The multiverse, as the prompts have stated,” Athela replied flatly. “I can’t tell you more than that at the moment, though. The system forbids it, and I don’t feel like being smitten by that damnable thing. It’s a real stickler with its rules. Don’t worry, though, you’ll figure it out eventually even without my help.”

Riven and Hakim shared a glance with one another but remained silent for a few minutes after that to mull over what the spider demon had said.

“So what do you wanna be?” Riven eventually asked Hakim, steering the conversation back on track to the near future. “Any idea now that we’re going exploring into no-man’s land?”

Hakim’s response was quick. “Baker.”

Riven spewed the water he’d been drinking out of his mouth and all over the floor as he choked amid his laughter with the grin Hakim was giving him. “Cut the shit.”

Hakim threw up his hands to either side. “I don’t know what’s out there. I see the system describes you as a Novice Warlock, but I haven’t seen much about classes yet. I don’t even know how to get one.”

“Surely you have some idea. Do you want to pursue the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy lifestyle? Or do you want to settle down and live peacefully? Is being a baker really what you want to do?”

Hakim rolled his eyes and gave Riven a look. “Adventuring sounds fun if you’re talking fantasy, though I never played Dungeons & Dragons before. Maybe a warrior of some kind? That is, assuming this is really a magical realm we’re entering given the types of crafts and context clues I’ve seen. Despite the danger, I believe it would be a good fit for me. Who doesn’t want to do that kind of thing?”

“Figured you’d say something like that. You’re definitely built for it.”

They continued eating in silence for a time, and Riven took the opportunity to more thoroughly inspect his surroundings. In doing so, he was easily able to identify which crafting station was which.

The smithing station had a furnace, an anvil, bellows, hammers, tongs, ingots of various metals, a firepit, and numerous other medieval smithing tools or materials littered about a rather large and solid stone table. The cooking area had rows of meats, bottles of spices, pots, pans, cutlery, roots, powders—the list went on. The clothes-making station had numerous textiles—though they were all rather plain, consisting of a couple archaic sewing machines, thread, needles, leather straps, some hammers, of all things, and a variety of odds and ends Riven couldn’t recognize to save his life. The mapmaking station contained a miniature replica of the room, along with a hologram that flickered on and off in various patterns and a bunch of blank sheets with an inkwell and feather pen. The totem-making section displayed another small furnace with mounds of clay, a variety of sharp and dull tools, some odd metal pieces laid out as insignias, wooden boards with a nail and hammers, some feathers, and paint. Meanwhile, the prophecy corner sported a couple cushions with floating wisps of light that danced among the air.

“Welp…” Riven muttered, getting to his feet and turning with a thumb hiked in the direction of the prophecy area. “I’m going to go check these things out. Maybe it’ll be therapeutic after all the bullshit. Catch you later.”

Hakim gave him a wave, then settled back down on the stone floor to lie facing up at the ceiling. “I’m going to take a nap. Don’t stab me in my sleep.”

“I would never. I’d have the crazy spider do it.”

They exchanged grins, and Hakim closed his eyes while Riven took his backpack and marched past the small family of three. He paused, though, remembering that he had a blanket in the bag. Taking out the quilt and then removing his cloak, he handed both of them to the two nude women with a nod and a brief glance that did not linger. They seemed startled at the act of generosity, but before they could say anything more, he’d already left them to start for the prophecy area.

Coming to a stop at the table in front of the cushions and floating orbs of light, Riven acknowledged that this was the most barren of the stations. By far. A single book was set on the table, with only a small crystal ball present otherwise.

He glanced up at one of the lights that floated over and reached out to touch it, but his hand passed right through it, giving him nothing but a warm sensation. The blood vessels and musculature of his hand did light up as it passed through, though, so that was kind of cool.

Picking up the book, which had the sigil of an outstretched hand and an eye painted along the hand in black ink, he opened up to reveal the first paragraph. It was all written in English in the same black ink as the cover but had more of a curvy text style than normal letters.

[The Basics of Prophecy: Written by Oralmius Mephator, third sage of the White Tower]