Surviving as a Broken Hero

“I said attack me.”

I was somewhat hesitant, but I figured she knew what she was doing. Besides, as long as I pulled my punches at the last moment, her strong build looked like she could take a few hits without trouble.

Thinking so, I rushed forward at her, testing the waters with a normal punch aimed toward her center of mass.

As I was punching forward, Krylla stepped on the orb on the floor, and the sound of the fragile glass shattering was heard.

Ksh!

The room was instantly plunged into complete darkness, and my punch whiffed through the air.

As I was catching my balance, something slammed into my legs and sent me to the floor.

I couldn’t react to anything even if I wanted to, and then I received a one-sided beating.

Of course, she didn’t actually try to hurt me much.

Her rough voice growled out at me through the darkness as she knocked me down again whenever I tried to stand up.

“You’ve probably figured this out by now, but I use my ears to ‘see’. It isn’t as simple as just shutting off the lights and taking some damage, or else everyone would be able to do it.”

‘So what am I supposed to do, then?’

I guessed that she was trying to teach me. The problem was that it wasn’t a skill that was easily learned or taught, especially in the few hours we had.

“Focus on my voice. You can hear where I’m speaking from, right?”

She was somewhere to my left, though the echoes in the cave made it hard to judge distance in any way as I could only judge depth with sight.

“Turn to me.”

I obliged, standing up and turning to her voice.

“Good, now rotate to follow the sounds I make.”

Tap, tap.

Her feet made exaggerated sounds as she tapped hard on the floor with each step.

We continued in such a manner as the quest time continued to tick down, for hours on end until my mind felt numb and her taps grew softer and softer.

Then, just as the timer was about to hit the hour remaining marker, she had me sit still as she placed her hands on my head from behind.

“That’ll have to be enough, I want you to focus on your breathing now and accept my mana. I’m going to show you how I see.”

I still wasn’t sure of her skillset or class. I had guessed that she was a fighter of some sort when I had seen the axe on her back, but being able to use magic in such a way disproved that.

I felt a warmth penetrate through her hands into the top of my head, seeping into my body and filling me with a sort of half-drowsiness—like I was falling asleep.

“Focus on the sound of your breathing, imagine each breath as a wave of motion, a wave of tactile sensation that amplifies and returns to you through your ears.”

Her voice sounded as if from a great distance through the murkiness of my mind. Hazy as I felt, I did my best to focus on my breathing.

‘Each breath as a wave…’

I let out a loud breath, testing it. I imagined that the breath was a solid wave of blue water that coursed from my mouth, smashing against surfaces it contacted and receding back to my ears.

I wasn’t quite sure if it was my imagination, but I ‘felt’ the stone I was sitting in and the faint, muddy image of Krylla was envisioned in my mind after a moment, a distorted sphere of ‘sight’ around me.

“Can you feel it?”

“Yes… I think so…”

“I’m going to make a motion with my head, tell me which direction I’m looking in.”

I focused on the hazy image I had in my mind of her figure behind me as she had her hands on my head. Her long braid dangled to the side as she turned her head.

“To my left side?”

Her hands lifted off of my head, and the fuzzy sensation remained in that half-conscious and trance-like state.

“Tell me which arm I’m lifting.”

I waited as her hazy figure lifted one of its limbs.

“The right one.”

“And the fingers I’m holding up?”

It was too hard to see. I only had a heat-like mirage of a shimmering image in my head, enough to make out rough details and not much more.

“I can’t tell…”

“Why not?”

“It’s too hard to see…”

Thump.

Her foot lifted into the air and came back down on the ground hard enough to create a reverberating echo.

If each breath had been a wave before, then her stomp was the flood that encompassed the world.

Bright, vivid imagery filled my mind for a few seconds before fading back into the haze.

“Three.”

I had gotten a clear image of her fingers in my mind.

“Now I’m going to turn on another light and show you something else.”

As she said so, another orb flickered to life in her hand.

I was instantly hit with a wave of vertigo as the images in my head and the images in my sight overlapped.

You see, while the heat sense had acted as a sort of complementary sense to my sight, now sharing the same data points in a way that made touch and sight completely different, the echo sight that Krylla had shown me and my regular sight overlapped and clashed, warring in my mind with duplicated and overloads of information until I had to shut my eyes again and wince, fighting back the urge to vomit.

“Now you understand why I’m blind.”

It made sense. In one way, I had almost felt sorry for her lack of sight, but the echo sight that she had shown me was perfectly suited to caves, tunnels, and enclosed spaces where sound would quite literally echo around the walls and amplify the return of information. I couldn’t imagine how difficult it would be on the surface, though.

“It’s going to take work to get into that state again, and it won’t come easily at first, but it should eventually come to you as a skill.”

Of course, abilities that could be used easily or at the user’s will were categorized as skills. Some people could perform magic or use other skills that weren’t usually appropriate for their class without actually getting a skill, but that usually came at the tradeoff of having longer activation times or needing to concentrate for a long time.

Such skills might eventually turn into actual System skills over time as the Awakener becomes more proficient in using them, but some might also never reach that point. It all depended on the user.

It had taken most of our preparation time, and what time was left would give us just long enough to return to the Relic room and ready ourselves for whatever was going to arrive.

As we headed back for the Relic room, Krylla and I went over what we could do.

Krylla’s class was called a ‘Stone Speaker’, and it worked with and enhanced her echo sight further than I would have ever been able to use it, even if I had gained it as a skill. The class was based around Strength, Endurance, and Magic, and allowed the Awakener to perform all sorts of stone and resistance-based magics. She explained that she would even be able to later mend the entrance I had created.

In turn, I told her about my class being a sort of elementalist monk class, which was probably the best way to explain things without saying that I had a Second System. Though she had never heard of one before, there were plenty of classes and elements to the System that were constantly being learned about.

Finally, we came back to the Relic room, the golden, soothing light bathing the little cavern from the Relic still sitting calmly at its center.

“Here, there should be enough mana in it to last you for a bit.”

Krylla handed me the light sphere after imbuing it with more of her mana.

While I had learned the very basics of echo sight, we had both come to a sort of unspoken understanding that what I had learned wouldn’t be dependable enough to rely on so soon.

“Follow that tunnel down, take the first fork to the left, and go until you reach the mushroom cavern. You’ll know when you see it.”

I wondered why we were going off to intercept the attackers when we could just wait there in the Relic room for them to come to us.

“Can’t we just wait here instead of separating?”

She shook her head in response.

“If we do, we run the risk of them overwhelming or bolting past us in the wide space on a beeline straight for the Relic. There are actually only two tunnels that lead to this offshoot of the entire tunnel system, so if we each intercept them at the narrowest points of each one, they have no choice but to come at us one by one or run away.”

It was a bottleneck strategy similar to stories I had heard on Earth where a man or group would defend a bridge or pass against an overwhelmingly large number of enemies.

There wasn’t anything I could think of in refute to the plan, so I took the orb and glanced back at the Relic again before heading down the tunnel, again debating the quest options in my mind.

If I was ever going to go for the Relic, right then was my chance. I could simply turn around and walk back into the room, gaining whatever ability the Relic would give me while also completing my System quest. Alternatively, I could just destroy it if I was afraid of the consequences.

I still wonder whether I should have.

I was curious about the Second System’s quest to protect the Relic. To that point, the Second System had proven reliable in at least solving things more through peaceful means or protecting as many as possible. Did that mean that the Second System was somehow saying that protecting the Relic was for the greater good?

If that was the case, did it also somehow know what the Relic would give me if I used it for myself? In the worst-case scenario, I figured I would at least gain XP from the things going for the Relic, and who was to say that I couldn’t try to use the Relic later anyway?

Those thoughts cascaded through my mind as I took one step at a time towards the tunnel where I was to hold off the attackers.