Once, there was a realm ravaged by the mana drought. All monsters deperished, despaired, but for one. One snake that had defied everything and everyone.
She was now chained before me, squirming in vain.
A pathetic viper whose venom was exhausted. Six meters of hate choked by metal rings and chains. It would have been so easy to crush that fiend's bloodied head and end this.
But a human had spoken.
So I faced her, in the battered void armor I had faced her with, and I wanted her to see just what difference in power there was between us. Even though she was half-blind, she would sense it.
I let the armor vanish around me, revealing the frail clay body of a golem. My badger mask turned on her. She hissed furiously but her bounds had her coughing hard.
Then, I summoned the void armor again, pristine, with the coat of silver untouched. I put on the badger mask myself, then turned away.
Yes, I could have done that in the middle of the fight even.
The wooden door slammed behind me. I watched the iron chains grow on it as well. She had had two days to try and escape and for two days straight, she had failed.
I walked away, back up the stairs and to the higher deck of the Parao.
The ship was sailing free in the immensity. Music and perfumes played freely in the hallways. But this section of the deck was forbidden for all, lest they wanted to die from my hands. This was where the human rested.
I opened the door, found him on the bed, still asleep. The pendant on his neck, white bandages on his black skin. He had fully calmed now and the poisonous veins had receded.
At his side was the bird monster, the priestess, who had stood guard while I was away.
"Muasin won't escape." She assured with her steely voice.
"Oh she can try." I would have my occasion to kill her. "I just had to make sure she was still alive."
"You can remove your armor."
I just waved her off, had her leave the cabin and, once alone, I sat on a stool near the bed. Two days. And with that, who knew how much magic the human had burned.
Had his pendant been... in a better state, we could have salvaged that. But now, I wasn't sure he would even get two weeks before the mana drain claimed him. Everything had been squandered because of a miserable snake.
Another monster entered, the only one allowed. He approached with a bowl of water and towels, put them on the table and hesitated to approach.
He wanted to. But there was an ominous silver armor standing there.
"How is he?"
I answered: "About to wake up."
Any moment now.
He finally grumbled, twitched and immediately his wounded body lashed out, whipping him with pain. The lizard rushed to calm him.
Another few seconds and the human regained consciousness.
His eyes opened on the lizard holding his hand, saying words he could still not quite make out. He could not recognize that lizard monster. It was looking too human.
"It's me! Copain!" The beast was pressing him. "You are safe now! Don't push yourself!"
The human tried to stand up, clenched his teeth and stopped.
"Ah!" He moaned. "I feel like the world did a drive-by on my face! Where is everyone else?"
"They are fine."
He noticed my presence and, after a tense second, sighed in relief.
"The horde is licking its wounds. I called the Parao to nurse you back to health."
"The snake?! What about?"
I cut him.
"Alive. Chained in the lower deck."
He fell back on the bed and closed his eyes once more, for a moment, while the lizard was bringing him water.
All I had eyes for were his tattoos. From the two circles on his chest curved patterns had expanded all the way to the two arms and his legs, reached for his back and up the neck to his left cheek. It had probably done more for him than all our efforts to fight the poison.
This, I had convinced myself, was the human's system. An ancient way to grow that I found pernicious.
"What happened to you?" The human asked his lizard friend.
"I ascended!"
And he showed off his brand new humanoid body, all scaley and clean, covered in fine clothes. All that was let of his greyhound past was a single metallic plate running from the muzzle to his forefront.
He didn't get the reaction he expected from his friend, but the human congratulated him all the same.
Then, he turned back to me.
"Man, you were amazing! You fight monsters like this all the time?! I could not even keep up!"
That was a lie. But he seemed genuine enough. Maybe his innate system had tracked the mana flows for him while he was getting lost in the surface.
Either way, he had been a beast.
"We should kill that snake. You have no idea how dangerous she is."
"Hold that thought, my head is killing me!"
He thanked his friend for the towel and held it against his face. He had not realized yet.
I got up and gestured for the monster to follow out. The human needed more rest. But that beast stubbornly stayed behind and, given his friendship, I let that slide.
I closed the door on them.
It would take the whole day for him to fully recover. Outside the day was still shiny and bright, the sand abundant. But his peak had passed. And there was no time to make another pendant.
When dinner came, he rejected it all. The ship's food was out of question, so I offered to cook again.
Cheese, scallops, foie gras, tartare, tenderloins and puree... I was not sure why he found those scraps more appetizing than honey meat but humans had their own tastes.
Then, I stayed away in the cabin while the two friends talked.
"We are going to leave the ship again, aren't we?" The lizard was a bit thrilled. "You are going to find us a place to throw upside-down again!"
"Of course I will! Who do you take me for? I want out of that bed already!"
Then, he toned it down.
"I swore I would save this world. And you now, I'm not the type of guy who shirks away from a fight! But running around isn't doing much."
"It's okay! We have a lifetime before us! Heck, it's incredible that we've lived so far already!"
And he explained the simple numbers of this realm. Newborns in the wild lived less than a day on average. Those that made it through hardly survived a week. From the moment they were born, they were just fighting an uphill fight from a drain that would always win.
In comparison, his lizard friend was already an elder and, had he realized this human was some sixteen to seventeen years old, he would not have understood.
That teenager was feeling his face burning again. He was strong enough now to drag himself to the bowl of water and wash it up. And when the water calmed he looked at his reflection. He looked at his two eyes, one of them a feral yellow.
"Uh? What's with my eye?"
"Oh!" The lizard quickly explained. "They replaced it with one from the snake! It was to stop the poison or something."
It was so the body learned to live with that poison. In time, it would be possible to put the original eye back but, for now, that was all I had found to prevent the worst.
"Wait wait wait, where is my real eye?!"
"On the snake." I answered that one.
That made him laugh, and twinge.
Rather than go back to bed, the human went to the large porthole. All he could see from there was the starboard hull and the large fins below waving over the sand.
"So I am half-snake now."
That was really not how magic worked, but I did not bother pointing that out.
His friend felt the change of mood too and, still reluctant to offense a human, offered to go and prepare a bath for him. By this evening or tomorrow they would be gone anyway, so, he reasoned, might as well enjoy the place while they could.
Once he left, it was just me, against the wall, and the teenager at his porthole.
"Is this how monsters see the world?" He asked me.
"What?"
"I don't know, a kind of sixth sense that covers everything in particles... Like everything is made of sand!"
He turned around, frustrated, one hand on the snake eye.
"When I look at Copain, I can see a spark in him, I think it's his heart. And when I look at you, you are like a Christmas tree! With something at your neck that's just pitch black."
I removed the badger helmet, let him see the clay head beneath with its silver and marble badger mask. The gorget detached next and I brought out the beads necklace.
"That's an old tool to absorb mana. It... works too well."
"So you mean I'm seeing mana? Eh... neat!" He fumbled a bit. "I'm okay! I can stand now! The sooner I leave this cursed ship the better!"
"What's wrong with the Parao?"
"Man, you're kidding, Kaele? Have you visited the lower decks?"
"They are monsters. This is the path they chose to survive. I personally think this is the most human approach to the problem."
"Seriously?!"
"Yes. The horde just kills itself over and over. Pelum is collective starvation. And that's only what you have seen. But here, a tenth of them actually gets to forget the drain."
It was actually even better since, through boredom or twinges of pain, those at the top duelled and thus opened slots for more beasts to ascend. As close as monsters could get to a human equilibrium.
The teenager was looking at me like I was mad. Or a clay golem. Whichever it was.
I quietly pushed him toward the bed. He still needed some rest.
"Whether you like this ship or not, it is still the best place for you to recover. It has the most mana."
"Because a ton of monsters are packed in a small space?" He guessed.
"No, because we are draining entire dungeons."
He was about to lay down, got back up and forced me to step back.
"What do you mean by that?"
"Nadjal, the priestess, has a ritual to drain an entire pool of mana. Think Pelum. A part of it is recovered, and the a part makes it here. About thirty such rituals are feeding the ship, ensuring it nevers runs out of magic."
He had seen it back when first stepping into the realm. Behind the icy mountain, he had seen what had once been a dungeon, reduced to a dead plain scorched by the void.
It was very wasteful but without it, the Parao's model would have never been sustainable.
Something was brewing in the human eyes. A fire barely contained. Or a fever. His hand had clutched the amber pendant, holding it tight with a force close to breaking it. And that, somehow, the feeling of that pendant, only made him shake harder.
"You should not concern yourself with mere monsters." I observed.
Next thing I knew I was on the floorboards, my pristine void armor pristine at the front, wrecked at the back. He had hit so hard, so fast and so cleanly that my stone tablet had stopped working for a few seconds.
He was at the door, saw me wriggle and raised his voice.
"I think I am getting the problem now. I suggest you stay down, pal."
And the human punched the palm of his hand with a fist.
"Because I am about to save the world for real!"