The sword is the axis of the world, and its power is absolute.

Pre-Fall General

There was no competitor’s cart parked on the last segment of the road, so this time, Johanna and the rest of her team didn’t bother sneaking around. They took the main road descending from the small hill into the Ancient ruins directly below, heading down.

“Back,” Tom said.

“Yea,” Johanna simply replied.

As one, the four looked toward the general direction where they had their encounter the last time… less than two weeks ago. To where they had been changed, irrevocably now. To where their lives had been pushed into another direction.

Of course, they had known they’d migrate to Valetta at one point. They had picked a home, made plans. But it should have been on their own terms, at their own pace. Not this catastrophic exile, a village turning against their own after facing the weird. Turned away, like an invasion of magic beasts from the mana wilds.

A distant howl rose as if to welcome them. Johanna turned, trying to figure out where it came from, before realizing it was to the side, maybe in the forest even rather than the ruins proper.

“Doesn’t sound impressive,” Tom said.

“No, it doesn’t,” she realized.

They were all better prepared now than they had been back then, she knew. They spent the two and a half days of travel checking their abilities. If, as Tom said, the mysterious force behind the Skeleton – and she almost automatically gave it an uppercase-S now – had augmented their capacities, then they were significantly better now than when they’d faced the three Canids.

Peter, in addition to his newfound better aim, had a much higher endurance while scouting. He did it in the morning, checking out the surroundings, and his ability to stay hidden had significantly improved. Where he’d estimated he was close to three-quarters of an hour before a bout of weakness passed him and he found himself exposed, he was now able to sustain his stealth for an hour and twenty minutes, maybe a bit less.

To which he complained that it meant he’d have to wake up half an hour earlier to scout forward of the team, “in case”.

Johanna had never tried to measure her own, so she didn’t have any comparison between “before Anasta” and after. What surprised her was that she had about the same endurance as Peter, regarding her flame. She could sustain it in her hand for almost exactly the same time as he did his scouting. They would have done a direct comparison if they had had more time to check. But once she felt empty, and the flame sputtered, she needed about five minutes to get something back, and even then, it was a fleeting flame that vanished after less than a minute. Even an hour of recovery left her with barely eight minutes of flaming hand.

That was a significant warning sign – they needed to maintain readiness and couldn’t waste their abilities willy-nilly. Else, they’d find themselves potentially defenseless.

The big problem was the flame on her knife. She could conjure it on any blade – even scissors, which she thought absolutely mind-boggling – but nothing else. And it lasted a lot less, maybe half the time, before she emptied herself and had to wait. She’d timed it after spending all of her magical energy – mana? – and she could light her knife for maybe twenty seconds as soon as it returned, while she could sustain a flame in her hand for nearly forty.

And, of course, trying to do both at the same time was even more draining on her reserves. They both shut down at almost the same time, which meant she was pulling out her mana energy from the same place for both.

Once she had time, probably back in Valetta, she would need to measure her ability to freeze people in place. See how long that one lasted. Tom was going to grumble.

The other two had much more difficulty gauging their own progress. Tom thought his abilities only applied to beasts. He didn’t run any faster trying to reach a tree or any of the other three. And he wasn’t about to test his brand-new hammer on Johanna, even with Laura ready to heal.

As for Laura herself, besides her newfound ability to inspire a form of dread, to cause hesitation – even to her friends, if she wanted to – she had no way to gauge how much her other abilities had improved, if any had. The only thing she noted was that she slept better.

Which surprised everyone. Except maybe Peter.

As they started their way across the near-razed ruins of the border, Johanna found she had mixed feelings about being back to salvaging there. In any case, they had relatively little choice. They might have taken possession of their house, but the bank loan had to be repaid, the “taxes” would come, and they still needed enough to live. It was a bit too early to think about seeking other – safer – trades, assuming that Valetta had good opportunities.

Johanna doubted there were many opportunities as lucrative as salvaging. No, they had to do it. And given that they knew they could deal with most of the non-magical threats of the Ancient nameless ruins, it was time.

To do what they mainly had avoided thus far. Head all the way in, to the Ancient depths.

By unspoken consensus, they completely avoided the area where the Skeleton had been. They might be feeling strong right now, but that was the kind of thing none of them were ready to face since it was the source of that very strength. But the distant higher ruins beckoned and they made their way there. While no parts of the ruins would presumably have escaped salvaging across the decades, the ruins’ center might be the best place to find new things, or so Johanna thought.

Like the areas they’d been scavenging for most of their time, the central parts of the ruins were a mix of almost entirely vanished structures and relatively well-preserved parts. But the first such they’d explored had been obviously visited, yielding relatively few easy opportunities. For the moment, they were mostly scouting, with an eye for the future, but easy, portable salvage was mostly lacking. And the previous salvagers had not been very professional, often upturning stuff with little regard for future salvage opportunities. As it was, there were lots of materials, but that looked more like steel stuff rather than the more valuable Alium, and relatively few intact portable items.

She spotted the colorless, undefinable light twirling above in the sky, despite the cloud cover. The light – manalight, she decided to call it – was distinctive in its unnatural appearance.

“Magic,” she warned the rest.

“Where?” Tom asked.

She pointed the relatively well-preserved ruin further down the street they’d been following, trying to gauge this particular area until they settled in for serious digging into the ruins. Most of the ruins on one side still had multiple floors, but the other side of the street seemed to sport different single-floored buildings. The mana traces she’d spotted seemed to coalesce above one such.

“Looks more like the thing I saw at the caravan in Valetta rather than the splashes I’ve seen.”

They’d avoided two areas like that, where the walls and an entire sidewalk had glowed with the invisible traces of mana, and one where an entire square of empty ground had similarly gleamed with invisible manalight. None of them were going to risk being further Changed. Although, Johanna thought the splashes she’d been looking at were incapable of doing so, as she was the only one seeing them. Changestorms and Manastorms were supposed to be so strong, anyone could see them.

Just like the glow before they got zapped by the Skeleton.

Still, they proceeded cautiously. As she got close, she looked at the swirling manalight. It danced slowly above the building, making lazy tracings. She couldn’t convey how it really looked, lacking exact words. Despite the transparent nature of the light, it seemed to flow, upward and downwards in alternatives streams, obeying laws she had no knowledge of.

From closer, the rivers of light were slightly more defined. They had no visible anchor or source above, but they hit the upper part of one of the walls, disappearing into the building proper through the structure itself, without a hole or anything.

Like most, it had barely survived the decaying of the Ancient ruins. Despite the telltale sign of magic going into it, mana hadn’t preserved it the way it did other parts. An almost entirely faded flowery script adorned the top, saying “Jake’s Gami… orium”. Johanna assumed that the Jake in question had been the owner of whatever Ancient business place this was.

The door and the windows had long since disappeared, with some creeping vines straddling the empty frames, so she stepped in carefully, looking at the inside. Long stretches of metal shelves confirmed this had to be some kind of store, although she had no idea what it sold, as the shelving only had some stains, and nothing remained of what it once held.

The store itself was thoroughly decayed, but one part remained vibrant somehow, including a four-foot-high art piece. She stopped, surprised and fascinated, at the depiction of some woman, protective smithing goggles lifted atop her head, holding flames in her hands. The bottom of the picture sported a fanning of what looked like some kind of play cards, albeit nothing like a classic tarot or general deck she was familiar with.

“Doesn’t look like you,” Tom said from behind her.

“I know. I don’t wear chainmail and form-fitting leather. And she’s a redhead anyway.”

“But it’s the kind of stuff that sells well,” Laura added.

“Grievar will probably say he needs to wait for the right buyer,” Johanna laughed.

Peter moved and started peering at the poster, seeing if it could be removed without being torn or damaged. Laura was half right, Johanna admitted to herself. Stuff that was well preserved like that was a thing for collectors. Some notable in Valetta or beyond was bound to be interested in the prestige of Ancient art, although how long this one would last once removed from the ruins, no one knew.

Speaking of salvage, she turned away from the art and looked further, finally spotting the streaming light that fell toward the rear of the store.

“The magic goes there,” she pointed before starting.

A door had once separated the storefront area from the back, but the metal frame was now fallen on the ground. The rear of the store was dimly lit through the entrance, but Johanna had no difficulty locating the source – or recipient – of the magic flows.

The shelves in this storage area had fallen down, and the item that was at the end of the ribbons of mana was lying on the floor, intact amidst the decayed and frayed trash.

It looked like a very long knife… no, a sword. A slightly curved sword, whose blade shone with that strange unnatural light. Clean, unmarred by the passage of time.

Tom swore just behind her and she turned.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

“No kidding. Maybe I don’t have your magical sight, but you can see it’s some kind of advanced forging. My neighbor in Avon had an heirloom, some kind of sword from old times, but that was shit compared to that one.”

Peter and Laura’s heads popped through.

Is that a game replica? Moore wondered.

The sword on the dirty half-corroded linoleum looked like one of those fancy katanas from JRPGs. He didn’t play many of those, but that’s what it looked like. Which, given Johanna and her friends were scouting what looked like an old local game store, sort-of fit. He wasn’t in the replica market, since he didn’t think much of memorabilia like some nerds out there, but there had been a huge booming business online of stuff based on all kinds of games.

However, that sword wasn’t a cheap ass katana for nerds. It looked like a high-end sword, the kind that would sell for thousands, forged by grandmasters using ancient techniques – with maybe a hydraulic hammer to help – on commission for wealthy sword fanatics. They were lucky to have found it.

But the real shock was when she lifted it from the floor, as a descriptor popped up as if she was touching a person. It wasn’t a character sheet, more like…

Eversharp

Tier 6

Effective: 133/133 mana (+90/hour)

Passive: Cannot lose your grip on a weapon up to 133 pounds

Active: Cuts any unprotected material up to 13.3 inches deep

Active cost: 1 mana per 11 inches of lateral cut

Wait, is that a skill?

The list of available skills now included it, given that he had seen it. A very high requirement skill, with a level of 7, 21 Strength, 17 Dexterity, and 17 Authority. The skill version only had a multiplier of 1 for Tom’s Battler specialty, it relied on stamina rather than mana, and also applied to any bladed implement. The basic math suggested that the katana used a multiplier of 6 instead of 1, matching the tier mentioned on the descriptor: six times 21 Strength, plus 7 levels would give an effective skill of 133, which fit the pool and both passive and active listing of the skill. Even the oddly phrased part.

Okay, magical items are a thing. And that thing is insane.

“The big question is, how do we sell this?” Laura asked.