Goal: Save Tarquin

Nic didn’t answer right away. Instead, he asked, “You fought Azmin, right? The human leader? What was she like? It’s only a matter of time till we scrap, so if you have any tips…” Somehow, he wasn’t betting on Sula having killed her.

The System liked to play favorites too much to allow that to happen.

“We fought. She got away. I did give her the chance to back down, but she seems to think I stole something from her.” Sula raised a scarred eyebrow, but Nic just grinned his most devilish little axolotl grin. “Considering most of what we ‘stole’ was people, I wasn’t inclined to listen.” She shrugged it off.

“She’ll be a tough opponent for you. There’s a skill she has that draws strength from killing enemies - one that will enable her to grow constantly. It's a sign the System wants to develop her potential. If you don’t find a similar skill or talent, you won’t be able to keep up forever. Even if you can take down this Azmin…”

“There will be another prodigy, and another. The System will want to use you as a grinding stone to test its prospects and eke out their true potential.” She tapped the ash-white end of her cigarette away.

“When I was younger I had to kill three Tyrant-Beasts. That’s the name the System gives to monsters who exceed their limits and become powers in their own right. These days I wonder who they were. At the time, they were just terrifying beasts- my Sophont ‘guide’ convinced me there was no stopping them, no reasoning, that they were forces of nature. The last one...”

“That was where I lost my arm.”

Nic nodded. It seemed like the System would never truly accept him. Something- maybe just being from an Integrated world- marked him as outside its schemes.

They had given him a Sophont, but going from what Sophia had said they were more used to study oddities than to signal the System’s favor.

And that was about what he expected. He was nobody and from nowhere. He’d make his own way.

“So, considering nothing is ever that easy, you’re not about to give me one of those skills, are you?”

“I have one. It’s just-” She snickered. “The chief requirement is hardening your heart and cutting away your emotions. I don’t think you’d get much use out of it. Even I struggle to make it work for me.”

Nic nodded. It didn’t sound like it was well-suited to him at all.

“What I can do, on that front, is give you a lead.” She reached into her own mystic bag and took out a pair of thin bronze pages chiseled with ancient hieroglyphs. “These are part of some ancient cultivation manual. Something the System found worth preserving when it tore this poor world apart. I suspect it’s the end goal of this layer - the real goal. The System’s storylines are usually more of a distraction, while it feeds us what it thinks will make us thrive, or experiments with us.”

Nic wanted to show her the pearl and ask. She’d probably know more than him, and be willing to say more than Sophia. The question was - could he trust her?

Probably as much as he would be able to trust anyone. He’d saved her people, she’d saved his life, and they’d only ever been honest with each other. But this was a person whose world had burned. Who had led her people through storm and fire.

Nic didn’t know if you could ever completely trust someone like that; if push came to shove, they would have to betray their own people to hold to their deal with you.

If the pearl was somehow the key to saving Sula’s world she’d take it in a heartbeat. Worse, she’d probably convince Nic to hand it over.

He took the bronze plates. The moment he touched them he felt a small spark carry between the two, fusing their powers. It felt like a stream of sunlight flowing through his arms and weaving across his meridians. He took out the first one he’d acquired, and all three glowed with a subtle light.

“So, I’m guessing the thing to do now is bumble my dangerous little self across the desert killing and looking for more of these?” He examined the glyphs. He still had no way of reading them, but the quest he’d picked up in the Valley of Memories offered a way through that problem. “You know, a lot of this System seems to run on luck and a willingness to throw yourself at danger in the hope of there being something shiny at the other end.”

Sula just chuckled.

Sophia, by contrast, chimed in sounding almost annoyed. “Nicolas. You do nothing but throw yourself at danger. You do not get to complain now like the System twisted your arm to make you do it.”

He didn’t respond. Slightly guilty, slightly proud, he just grinned. “Any hints on where to start bumbling?”

“Not a clue, but I have something better. This-” Sula said, taking a pouch of black velvet from her belt. It was no larger than a fingerbone. “Is a prodigy’s luck. Pure, unfiltered, System-approved. It’s one of the things that made my mother a heretic. She learned to, well...”

A sneaky grin crossed the elven warrior’s face. Her scars and tattoos bent around the expression. “She would find the little hellion-prodigies the System had marked as its favorites and pull what made them special out. She called it Stardust, but it’s essentially how the System tracks someone, a bit of their signature, not quite their soul- having it on you will convince the System to throw you more tests and lucky breaks.”

A minute ago Nic had been thinking about making his own luck. This… was more literal than he’d been expecting. But it was ambitious. Stealing the fate of the System’s favorites…

He understood where Sula got her confidence. Her mother must have been fearless.

“Don’t worry. Using it won’t mark you as a heretic.” She pressed it into his hand. Small golden runes were stitched into the black surface, making it look like a starry night, the top tied closed with a blue ribbon.

“I mean…” Nic shrugged. “Aren’t all of the System’s favorites a little heretical? It seems like half of the people I meet have gone a little over the line...”

“Exactly. Rules are for the weak, after all.”

“This must be priceless.” Nic had already tucked it away, mind. He had no intention of turning down a gift just because it was spectacularly valuable. Just the opposite.

“Don’t worry, it’s not my only charm. And if it helps you find the nuclear fire I need, then its a trade worth making, no?” She passed the stub of the cigarette his way but this time Nic turned it down.

“If you don’t mind me asking…” Even if she did. “What happened when the Inquisitor arrived? To find your mother?”

A shadow passed over Sula’s face. “It was… something to behold…”

“There’s one Inquisitor for this entire arm of the cosmos. Inspector Shrike. I suspect he’s been at it for hundreds of years. It was quiet when he arrived - my mother had already fought off dozens of heretic hunters. I helped, but she wanted to me leave, she knew what was coming.”

“And I didn’t escape quite fast enough. I saw what happened.”

“Poison smog. Choking, killing, turning everything it touched foul. Whatever died rose as an undead, full of more poison. Killing them just spewed it out and started the process again.”

“We thought…” Her cigarette ran to nothing and scorched her fingers. With a look of annoyance she focused and the stub turned to a piece of solid ice, sizzling as the fire went out.

“We thought he’d be weaker in person. That if we could get him away from his hoard, we could fight him together and maybe win.”

“We were almost right. We cracked the fabric of our reality to do it, but we pulled him into a spatial rift, a place where dozens of portals and subdimensional spaces ran together. We fought like the left and right hands of an angry god.”

“But we couldn’t harm him. There was a barrier of System-runes around him, protecting him from everything. The one thing that harmed him was when the spatial rift started to break apart. It was brief - my mother was dead - but I saw him bleed when a crack in space ripped off a fingertip. That was all I got for my mother’s life…”

“A piece of flesh smaller than this cigarette butt.”

She flicked the frozen stub away, sending it flying through the air. Dawn had begun properly. Waves of pink and orange light filled the sky as the brilliant disk of the sun emerged, turning the rivers that flowered through the air above to ribbons of gold.

“Thanks. For what it’s worth-” Nic slowly got onto his feet, tucking away the three bronze plates into his mystic bag, and hooking the tiny stardust charm to his belt. He felt it was better to have it close to his skin, for some reason.

“If my mom turns out to be a famous heretic who murdered the System’s darlings and went down fighting, I’ll be proud of her. She was probably just a prostitute.”

Sula laughed sadly, shaking her head. “You don’t strike me as someone with a tragic tale of revenge to tell, Nicolas. I expect you’ll leave other people with a great many dramatic grudges and dark days, but you?”

“You seem more like the kind of thing that happens to people.”

Nic wished she was right about that. But he smiled, and waved, and set off with the famous last words, “I’ve got to go happen, then.”

As he walked through the camp he received waves, lifted horns full of ale, and one-

Flirtatious wink?

He wasn’t sure how to feel about that one, right now.

As he moved towards the edges of the camp, where the only ones about where scouts perched on the rocks watching the horizons, Nic finally asked. “Sooooo…”

“I can only assume you’re talking to me.”

“I notice the counter is gone…” Nic started. “And I’m guessing I didn’t sleep through an entire day, miraculously getting me to the end.”

“That would be your best bet on completing it, but no.”

“I guess I had to help them. And the truth is I’m not sorry for doing it.” Nic couldn’t say he regretted it, exactly. Although it had certainly left him sore. “I think it was worth it, in the long run. We have the Stardust now, a lead, some friends…”

“Nicolas, imagine a deck of cards. Imagine you bet your life on drawing the ace of clubs. Even if you do, it is still a bad bet. I’m not angry you chose to help people- but I wish you’d think of all the people you could save if you live for a hundred years and cultivate to the peak. There are few enough good people in the cosmos, without the few we have killing themselves trying to hold up the sky.”

“It’s-” He groaned. “Hard to argue with you, Sofia. But I know what I have to do, sometimes.”

“I know. I’ve come to accept that the way forward isn’t going to be that your instincts change or your morals shift. I have to work with you, not push you to be someone else.” She sighed. “The quest is gone. I’ll get authorization for a new one. A way to earn your Moonseal Credit that suits your particular talents.”