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Book 5: Chapter 50 - Trial of the Goddess (RAW)
🕑 Added 2025-04-29 14:58:58 +0000 UTC“Will brings a thousand methods; reluctance breeds a thousand pretexts. Heaven esteems neither complaints nor ease—only the diligent work of intent.”
- Master Zhao Wushen of the Bloody Tower.
Somewhere, as I fell, a realization came to me, a moment of clarity, all the while I contemplated a potential death. The bastard Alexandros must have sent me through the gates of a Trial of the Goddess. He had sent me through to a dungeon so he would not have to stain his hands with my blood. Or, perhaps he simply lacked the means to end me. Either way, it did not matter.
I lay there for a moment, just a moment, and took a breath as I started to digest my predicament. This was a dungeon, a pocket of elsewhere, made manifest and very real. If the lore of it was true, I needed to slay a boss creature somewhere within this place.
Alarm still ringing in my ears, I started to get up, feeling disoriented. Even as my body slowly reknitted itself together, I dragged myself off the mangled wreck that had broken my fall.
A car. I had smashed a black, two-seat ground car to scrap.
A car, or a vehicle at least!
I staggered upright on trembling legs. Neon ideograms and semi-transparent figures bled into the humid night like fever-bright ghosts, casting the avenue in garish pinks and toxic greens. Onlookers clogged the sidewalk, mouths hanging open, lenses recording every second. I started to summon a spell. Their voices hit me in fragments—half-understood shards of some half-forgotten tongue—until the slow echo of Sage’s Sight slid into place.
You have gained 1 Intelligence.
An unlooked-for gift. I let a satisfied smile tug at one corner of my lip—right until a rasp like gravel in a tin can sliced through the chaos.
“Who the hell are you, and where the hell did you come from? That was my car, scrapspawn!”
The speaker lumbered closer: bald, neck thicker than a bull’s, nose laid flat by too many angry fists. A battered leather coat strained across steroid-swollen shoulders, and in his gloved hand he leveled a short, ugly tube of matte steel. A weapon. Behind him drifted a posse of carbon-copy toughs—scarred, sneering men who might have walked straight out of a gutter-level noir feed. At their feet knelt a girl: hair filthy or merely dirty-brown, one eye purpled shut, lips split and bleeding.
I shook myself, broken glass and wreck-remains falling like rain from my Adamantine armor. Looking at him from behind the slits of my visor, I pitched my voice so it rang over the sirens.
“I am Gilgamesh of Uruk, and battle runs still hot in me. You will find me of little patience. Who are you?”
“Ha! You got balls on you, I’ll give you that. No one from around this part of ‘Rastia does not know Gracious Jobe!” The bald brute—Gracious Jobe, if I half-heard correctly—grinned around broken teeth. “Man points a piece at you, Nex suit or no, and you don’t even flinch. This here’s a sixth-grade rig—mil-issue, battle-proved, good enough to punch through whatever you got on.”
Behind him, his henchmen started to mutter.
“What kind of accent is that? Not an Inner.”
“Fancy new government Nex suit? Think he fell outta a plane?”
“Don’t see any tronics… how’s it powered, hydraulics?”
“He speaks funny…”
Jobe wagged the barrel. “Like I said, friend, you totaled my ride. Pay up—or we’ll strip that shiny getup right off you. Might just be foreign heavy armor, but I bet the scrap weight alone’s worth a mint. Course, I’ll have to put one in you first, teach a little respect.”
A low growl curled in my chest. Without Entropy cloaking me with its touch, I reached a new understanding. To know a single moment perfectly is to know every moment from there after, too. Lingering Sage’s Sight bloomed again, layering a thousand translucent futures atop one another—projectiles flying, blades flashing, blood arcing in neon rain. Every vision ended with Jobe on the pavement, dead or wishing for it. All save for one. My soul sang as revelation came to me in this moment of tribulation; choice and prophecy were one.
I moved, and as I did so, a multitude of images were destroyed.
Mithril sang as it left its sheath, a flicker of argent moonlight amid pink haze. Jobe’s weapon barked. The slug shrieked against God-metal, ricocheting into the night. Impact shivered up my arm, but the blade, forged from the magic of the Elves, held flawless.
One of Jobe’s men toppled, howling and clutching a shredded calf.
Silence. Wide eyes. The stink of fear blossoming like rotten flowers.
I slid the blade home with a whisper of metal. “You need to practice your aim,” I said, voice flat as a tombstone.
Gold coins—heavy, sun-bright dinars from the Exchange of Al-Lazar—clinked onto the cracked pavement at Jobe’s boots. His crew hit their knees instantly, scrabbling for the gleam.
Suddenly and without warning, words of a most holy script blazed their way across my inner vision. It had been so long, I almost wept.
New Quest: Save Solarin
So be it. Fate had spoken.
“Take these as—” I paused, gaze snagging on the battered girl’s pleading stare. She would also serve as a guide, a tutorial fairy in flesh. “—as compensation. And I will be taking that one.” I pointed, unblinking.
Jobe’s eyes narrowed, reptilian. Greed warred with self-preservation behind them. “Don’t know what you want her for, but take her. Don’t think she’ll make much for a playdoll even if you clean her up. And, if this ain’t real aurum, you and I got a problem, Mr. Gilgamesh of Uruk.”
“They are real,” I said, every syllable weighted with inexorable promise. “Now choose: gold or death. I grow tired of this banter.”
He answered with a theatrically florid bow—the sort thieves give kings when daggers glint behind their backs. “Pleasure doing business.”
“Come, girl,” I ordered without looking back.
She scrambled to my side, wobbling on bruised knees. We turned our backs on the pack of scavengers and walked away beneath the humming ghosts that cried for our patronage. We walked as though the street were a garden path and we its only rightful patrons.
“Now, lead on, girl,” I said, still not slowing.
“Thanks,” she croaked, then gathered a shred of defiance around herself. “I’m not girl. I have a name, and that name Sol.”
I shrugged impassively. “Sol, then.”
A shiver of déjà vu rippled through me—as if I had lived and chosen this scene in some other life, some other story—while the city’s neon heartbeat quickened around us, and somewhere high above, a Goddess surely watched, weighing every step I took.
***
It was an impoverished area, a maze of rust-cheeked shanties and half-collapsed brickwork where scrawny alley cats slunk between trash fires, hunting rats that rivalled them for size. Cheap street-walkers huddled beneath flickering neon signs, tough-looking men with scarred knuckles lounged in crooked doorways, and beggars with hollow eyes rattled chipped metal cups for change. Looming beyond the crooked rooftops, glimpsed only when the tenements parted like diseased gums, rose a colossal black-and-grey rampart. Sol had informed me that this was the "Wall"—the barrier that fenced off Section-23 from the glittering heart of the inner city.
This was a dungeon, an echo fashioned from some other reality, god-spawned plane. I had to remember that none of this—the wretched streets, the rancid air, even the people—was ultimately real. It was all staged scenery inside a pocket of illusion, and I needed to carve that truth into my decisions if I wished to clear it and escape.
We trudged on for a good half-hour, twisting through back lanes so narrow they felt like cracks in a tomb. I must admit it, I lost my sense of direction in that warren of dead-ends and crooked stairwells. Still, the quest had not yet been completed. Why? Perhaps because the girl beside me was not yet truly safe.
Then, without warning, the girl halted.
“So, this is, like, super weird,” Sol blurted, worry and curiosity fighting for space in her voice. “Thanks again, but who even are you? Why’d you step in back there for me? Nothing’s free in Sec-23.”
“I am Gilgamesh,” I replied. “It simply felt… right to help.” A lie as elegant as it was a cliche. I exhaled, feigning fatigue. “I need somewhere quiet to think, to breathe. Before I quite literally crashed onto that Gracious Jobe fellow’s hood, I was fighting someone, fighting a war, Sol. And just for the record, Sol is short for Solarin, yes?”
Her eyebrows shot up. “Wait, so you’re a Meta? A flyer? Been tangling with the Drags?”
“Meta?” I echoed, the unfamiliar term clanging in my ears.
“You know — powers and stuff. Or maybe you’re an Esper?”
“Esper?”
“Mind-tricks, Tele-whatever, Pyrokine, making junk explode into fireballs — that kinda deal.” Her words sprayed out like bullets. “Nobody moves like you unless they’ve got juice. You straight-up bodied Gracious Jobe’s flunkies, dude.”
I opened my mouth to answer, but a cobalt streak bounced from a dirty wall and sliced across the air. Reflex, honed by many fierce battles, snapped the Mimic Shield into existence. Organic plates harder than tempered steel blossomed in front of me, and the blue blur smashed into them with a hollow crack. I lunged, hand shooting out, and snared my assailant by the throat.
A strange masked figure in skintight azure writhed in my iron grip, every sculpted muscle quivering.
“Tell me this is a Meta?” I hissed, forcing the words through clenched teeth. The man kicked and clawed like a snared insect.
“Y-yeah,” Sol squeaked, eyes wide as saucers. “That’s… that’s Velocity Rush…”
Sage’s Sight. Letters of light unfurled across my vision:
Koran Carradock - Velocity Rush [Meta-human lvl.23]
Health: 313/345
Stamina: 34/63
Mana: 10/10
Blitz (lvl.5)
Advanced Dash (lvl.5)
Intriguing. A part of me had thought I had been transported to yet another new world. However, his Status confirmed otherwise—I was still on Gesthe, trapped inside one of its dungeons. The theme here seemed to be a dark, futuristic setting, but it was a Trail nonetheless. Which meant that this... thing... was merely another monster spawned by it. A nothing.
“Koran Carradock,” I rumbled, savoring how his eyes bulged at the sound of his true name.
“That’s Velocity Rush! A 2nd circle Meta,” Sol gasped. “And you caught him like he was a—”
She never finished. I raised my visor and bored into him with eyes colder than winter steel. “Why ambush me?”
Carradock rasped uselessly until I eased my grip by a hair.
“Gracious Jobe,” he wheezed, “wanted proof you’re legit. The real deal. Said you were fast—I didn’t buy it. Had to see for myself.”
Part of me wanted the experience points—one twist of my wrist and they’d be mine—but something darker, older, whispered of better uses. I leaned closer, letting him taste the darkness on my breath.
“You will scuttle back to Gracious Jobe,” I said, voice sinking into a predator’s purr, “and confess your failure. Inform him I suffer no further distractions. Just as I plucked your name from the void, I can pluck him from any bolthole he scurries to. If he defies me, I will peel apart his little crew, note by screaming note, until their agony conducts a symphony of pain.”
“That’s … a lot to memorize,” he croaked, trying for bravado.
Smack. My free hand slammed across his cheek, carving fresh crimson. Smack—another, just because the rhythm pleased me. His Health bar plummeted.
“Memory reinforced,” I said silkily. “Fail, and I hunt you, your lovers, your litter of friends—every last soul you hold dear. Understand, Mister Velocity Rush?”
Silence. Trembling. Submission. Perfect. I released him. He vanished in a panicked comet of azure, the after-image dissolving like smoke.
Sol exhaled. “We should totally bounce before backup shows.”
“Patience,” I murmured, fixing her with a calm that evidently unnerved her; she swallowed audibly.
Half a minute later, fiery letters scrolled behind my eyelids:
Quest Completed: Save Solarin
1000 experience gained.
I turned to the bemused Solarin. “I do believe the message was delivered, Solarin,” I said with a sardonic smile. “Now tell me, what do you know of Boss Monsters in this forsaken place?”
Comments
Mesa
it is indeed a WTF moment
Joao Lua Candido e Sarmento
Bro thats so cool wtf
Mesa
pretty much
Hussar L
Cyberpunk!
