Jay woke to a scaly feeling running up one of his legs and panicked, remembering both the macabre parasite and vague recollections of dreams featuring snakes coming out of the water to strangle him. He flailed for a while, swatting at his legs, before his brain caught up and realized that it was just a film of mud drying on his legs. Alister uncurled partially from around his arm, just enough to be able to shake his skeletal head, and then curled back up once his silent shaming motion was complete.

  “Thanks for that,” Jay muttered.

  The first bit of life he’d seen out of the resurrected parasite since it had slithered up his arm, and it was to judge him? Could snakes be arrogant? That’s definitely what this felt like.

  Jay’s stomach rumbled. Really, it was surprising it hadn’t done that sooner. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d gone longer than a day without eating, much less two – now going on three – days. He hadn’t seen a single edible thing, either, unless the otters counted. And he definitely wasn’t going to eat those. They were too adorable.

  Actually, speaking of the otters, now that he wasn’t entirely worn out, something seemed odd about their presence. Beyond just being the first edible things he’d seen, they’d been just about the first living things he’d seen over his entire time in the swamp. Even the trees seemed dead; not a single one had had leaves on it so far. Jay was choosing to take the living creatures as a sign he was moving in the right direction.

  Even if it wasn’t, he’d already committed to his path. He needed to keep going in the same direction. Whatever that water was, it was his best hope for finding anything or anyone that wasn’t already aware of him and hostile. He didn’t need another armored man to show up. That really would be his luck. Maybe there were people on every edge of the swamp, ready and waiting for him to show himself.

  On that optimistic note, Jay checked the arrow he’d left to make sure he didn’t get turned around and set out. Hopefully it wouldn’t be too long of a walk to the water. He could already taste the fish he’d catch.

  *

  Thunder crackled above him and he flinched for reasons he couldn’t even put into words. Jay had never been scared of storms before, but that one peal of thunder shook him. He couldn’t even put into words why it affected him so deeply. It just…disturbed him. Maybe it was something to do with the fact that he hadn’t even noticed the clouds forming.

  Were storms just going to do this in this world? Show up out of nowhere and black out the sun? Because it felt like he could see a line where day became night at the leading edge of those clouds. Things had actually been warming up as the sun climbed towards noon, or at least the warmth was more noticeable than the last two days, but the wind that was coming off the storm said that that wouldn’t last long.

  Jay was pretty sure it was the local equivalent of spring at this point, unless the seasons were really that different from what he remembered on Earth, but it was the only thing he could think of to explain why the temperatures were varying so much. It was better than it being late fall or winter. If this had been the warmest this place got, he’d have been screwed when winter actually came around.

  Regardless of the season, the storm was moving fast. Lightning struck something, somewhere and thunder rang out again, louder than the first one. But he couldn’t be far from whatever that body of water had been.

  By the time the rain overtook Jay, he was able to see the water reflecting bolts of lightning in the distance. It was different from the water of the swamp, which didn’t seem to reflect the lightning at all, and he just hoped it was actually the water he’d been heading toward instead of some optical illusion. Maybe a swamp mirage, if that was a thing. That would just be depressing.

  The wind gusted, plastering the last bit of Jay’s hair that had remained dry to his head and drenching the back of his neck in cool water for good measure. At least it was still warmer than the muddy water around his feet. This cloudburst couldn’t last too long with how fast it had been moving. It wasn’t worth trying to find shelter for.

  Jay followed the lightning’s reflections the rest of the way, eventually ramming his foot against a thin rim of stone mid-step. It rose above the swamp’s water by about three inches, just enough that he hadn’t seen it but not enough to actually block anything that really wanted to cross. What was more of a deterrent than just the stone – to Jay, at least – was the fact that there was no ground on the other side of the lip. Just a steep, sharp drop straight into a roiling ocean that he could barely see, thanks to the rain and the mist coming off the water itself.

  It was a further fall than he’d be willing to take, even if the points of Resistance meant he would have a better chance of surviving it. Dropping straight into the breaking waves of what seemed to be an ocean of some kind from any height just wasn’t advisable. Maybe there’d be a safer route down once Jay could see more, but with the rain continually ramping up, he’d never spot it.

  Maybe it was time he found a place to hide to ride out the storm anyway. Jay hadn’t thought it would be a long one, but it had lasted the rest of the walk to get here already with no signs of weakening.

  Something broke behind him with an almost comically loud noise. Jay whirled to face the noise, feeling shards of whatever had broken hit him as he did, and saw a gap where there used to be a tree. There was only a stump left now, surrounded by splinters of all sizes that had been tossed out several feet in every direction. For a second, he thought it had been struck by lightning and exploded, but there hadn’t been any thunder. The fact that he could still hear was proof enough of that.

  The tree may have just dissolved. There definitely didn’t seem to be anything around that would have crushed it and Jay couldn’t think of anything else that would have caused an entire tree trunk to spontaneously fling itself to pieces in that many directions at once. Then lightning actually flashed and something sticking just barely out of the stump that remained glinted.

  Jay reflexively took a step toward it before he realized that anything that could detonate a tree like that was something he didn’t want to be near. He settled for leaning towards it and squinting, hands cupped around his eyes to shield them from the driving rain. It looked like a nail. Maybe even a needle, the more he looked at it, but it was wavering in place in a way that made the details difficult to see.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  Were these things just raining from the sky as part of whatever storm this was? Had it grown in the center of the tree somehow? That was an insane thought, but given that he was walking around with a skeleton wrapped around his arm, Jay wasn’t willing to count it out. Maybe some trees grew twitching metal needles around here.

  No matter where it came from, that spelled the end of his willingness to stay out in the weather. Jay turned the Crystalband back into a staff and, between flashes of lightning, tried to spot anywhere that could be a shelter. At least he didn’t have to check the entire area; the open air past the rim of the swamp wouldn’t give him anywhere to hide out. He started poking around, halfway hoping he’d knock open a sinkhole or something to crawl inside.

  The staff hit something and there was a flicker of light from beneath the water. He was on the verge of deja vu, already trying to think of reasons there’d be another structure here like there had been on the hill, when something twinged in his head. It wasn’t painful, exactly, but it wasn’t something Jay remembered ever feeling before. It was just a sharp sensation that encouraged him to take a second look at the blue-green shine, conveying that information like a new form of sight.

  A new form of sight…the thought made him realize what it had been: [Sense Magic]. It acted like a sense, gave him information like a sense, and was as seamless as the others he’d been using all his life. So there was something magical about whatever the thing under the water was this time. There was no way it was a brick again. Who would make a magic brick? A magic bricklayer, probably, but did those exist?

  Why was he thinking about this again?

  Right. Jay refocused on the magic whatever-it-was. It had to be there for a reason and maybe that reason would get him out of the rain.

  Something flew past him fast enough that he heard it without actually seeing it, followed quickly by a repetition of the noise from the tree disintegrating. The needle-nails were from the storm, or at least flying around on its winds. And they weren’t particularly picky about their targets; it was only a matter of time before one of those found him.

  Jay didn’t want to find out whether he would dissolve as easily as the two trees had. The magic brick might be useless. Or it might not. Either way, it was the only even potential lead he had to shelter.

  The more he looked at it, the more it looked eerily similar to an elevator call button. [Sense Magic] made it feel like there were traces of other magic coming off of the brick, like wires sinking deeper into the ground. How did someone activate a magic button?

  He tried to think at it, like he did for opening the System menus; a brief chant of open, open, open that didn’t seem to do anything at all. Unfortunate. It really seemed like that should have worked. But if it was a magic button, that meant it wasn’t a System button. No wonder why trying to control it like a window didn’t work.

  The wind gusted again and another tree dissolved. This time Jay heard something else, something that, even as new as he was to this world, he recognized: someone speaking with the weight of a System invocation. He couldn't make out the exact words but that extra sonority cut through the stormwinds. Were the nails a spell of some sort? An ability? How strong did someone have to be that their mis-aimed abilities could dissolve trees?

  The thoughts of spells and abilities gave him a new idea to try to test the button. Could he cast a spell and press the button at the same time? Maybe it was only magic that could interact with other magic. [Wither] was the only spell he knew that could go through his hand – and also the only spell he knew the function of in the first place, which he really needed to fix – so he’d have to use that and hope whatever magic was in the maybe-button didn’t count as something alive.

  He didn’t think it would. It didn’t feel alive through his magic sense, though that thought was riding the line between not making any sense and making every bit of sense. If Jay had to try to put a word to what it felt like he’d say it felt like crystals, but that also didn’t make much sense to him. If it ended up being a button after all, he’d probably know what it meant soon enough. If not, it was just one more mystery from the things he’d encountered.

  He cast the spell, feeling it wreath his hand in a way he hadn’t noticed while using it to drain the parasite, and poked the brick right at the center of the circle of blue-green like an overeager kid in a hotel lobby. The glow faded from the brick, splitting up into tiny threads that wormed their way into a square shape on top of the water. The center stayed clear until the square connected at the far end, until – with a whump of displaced air that was barely audible over the rain hitting the swamp water – a trapdoor materialized.

  It wasn’t quite an elevator, but it still led somewhere else. Somewhere safe from the needle-nails and their tree-destroying havoc. Jay hauled up on the iron ring that was bolted to the dark wood despite it looking like it was more rust than actual metal anymore and immediately grabbed onto the ladder that was underneath.

  He descended, pulling the trapdoor closed from underneath with the matching ring on that side, and with every rung [Sense Magic] kicked into a higher gear. Wherever this trapdoor ended up, it had to be soaked in magic. The new sense was a little bit overwhelming, honestly, with this much of the stuff around him. It was like he’d just recovered from a sickness that had stuffed up his nose and the first thing he did was stick his face directly into a durian.

  Jay’s foot met the floor and kicked up dust just from that. He couldn’t see the dust, since the bottom of the ladder was pitch black, but he could feel the grit as it worked its way into the top of his socks. He found a wall the only way someone that was the next best thing to blind could find a wall: smacking straight into it with his arms waving out in front of his body.

  Then he followed the wall.

  Really what else was he going to do? It might lead to something dangerous but going back up the ladder definitely did. Rock, hard place. Though after a few steps, once the idea occurred to him, he did shift his Crystalband into a staff to tap the ground ahead of him to try to minimize the chances he walked straight off an edge into some endless abyss.

  He stuck to the wall even as it started to curve away from him, the curl so steep he was pretty sure he was walking in circles without ever coming back to where he had started. Was he descending and the grade was just too gentle for him to notice? It was possible. It was definitely possible.

  The possibility became a certainty as the tunnel grew brighter, a glow the same color as the magic of the button building with every step he took. Once it bottomed out fully, the tunnel widened into a room lined with crystals that were clearly the source of the light on every wall except the furthest one from the entry point, which was just open space. Rain and sea spray occasionally shot up over the lip of the stone to shower against an invisible barrier that rippled every time a drop came into contact with it.

  But Jay’s attention wasn’t on any of that. As pretty as it was, it was all he could do to give it a brief glance as he took in the rest of the room and the thing in the middle. The giant snake wrapped around a much, much larger crystal jutting up out of the center of the room. The humongous snake that looked like nothing so much as an oil painting come to life. The colossal snake whose tongue was flickering out of its mouth, tasting the air.

  The monstrously huge snake whose cloudy false eyelids were pointed directly at Jay.