Chapter 4: Skeleton - Markets and Multiverses

“Hello?” I asked, looking at the skeleton and hoping that, despite all odds, it wouldn’t be hostile. Since our bodies were incredibly weird, maybe it was intelligent and friendly.

The skeleton’s hate filled gaze locked onto me, its eyes glowing with frosty hunger and emptiness. Its jaw clacked, and even though it had no lips, I could still feel that it was giving me a malicious sneer. It lifted its blade, and without a moment of hesitation, it charged at me.

The skeleton was not friendly.

Sallia raised her hand and pointed her palm directly at the Skeleton. Then, with ‘hmph,’ her Amethyst eyes seemed to sparkle, twinkling like stars in the night sky. I was confused, before remembering that Sallia had mentioned magic existed in her world.

Was Sallia about to use Magic? I suddenly felt like the threat of the skeleton was seriously diminished, if I had a powerful Mage with me.

And then…

Nothing happened.

“Huh?” Sallia looked at her hand with total confusion, as the Skeleton swung its sword directly at me. I was shocked, but managed to flop to the ground and roll out of the way before the Skeleton killed me.

Sallia slammed her frying pan into the skeleton’s face, dealing no visible damage but knocking it back a few steps. Then, she pulled me up and dragged me away, and the two of us began fleeing for our lives.

“My magic isn’t working!” said Sallia, shock and confusion still evident in her voice.

“I noticed,” I said, thanking whoever made the Market for the fact that I didn’t need to breathe and didn’t get tired while running. Otherwise, I would have been panting with exhaustion.

The two of us dashed down the street, back the way we had come. The skeleton, which had already recovered from Sallia’s attack, looked even more pissed off than before and stuck to us like glue. Neither side ran faster than the other, so it kept pace with us, always just a few steps away.

Seconds crawled by as we ran. I started to realize that this was going nowhere – we weren’t getting any further away from the skeleton, and neither party would ever get tired. If anything, time was on the Skeleton’s side, since Sallia and I would eventually run out of Achievement and ‘starve’ to death, while the Skeleton might be able to keep going forever. Fighting wasn’t an option, because I had no idea how to fight, and escaping seemed impossible because it was too close to us to find a way to hide from it

We needed something to break this stalemate.

“Do you have any ideas?” I asked, turning to Sallia.

“I’m working on it,” said Sallia, continuously jerking her head in different directions as she looked for a path to survival.

“Do you think it can climb?” She asked. “It doesn’t have any flesh on its body, so its hands probably don’t have very good grip, right?”

“Maybe? I’ve seen a lot of things I don’t understand recently, so maybe it has a way around that problem. But it’s worth a shot?”

“Then let’s try it! Come with me!”

Sallia darted to the left, heading directly into the front yard of a modern-looking house. Then, she immediately started climbing up a drainage pipe attached to the side of the house. In a few seconds flat, she scaled the side of the house and reached the roof.

I didn’t have time to give Sallia a dumbfounded gaze, although I wanted to. I ducked left the moment I saw Sallia move, and started climbing for my life. My movements were much slower than Sallia’s and I took a look at the skeleton.

It was too close! I panicked, nearly missing a handhold. Before I tumbled to the ground, I caught myself. However, the skeleton was already preparing to swing at me, and I had nowhere to dodge or flee now that I was partway up the drain..

Its eye sockets glowing with cold and hateful light. Am I going to lose another life less than a day after arriving here?

Before I had time to think further, Sallia’s frying pan slammed into its head, sending the skeleton tumbling to the ground. I looked up, and realized that Sallia had slid back down the drainpipe after seeing my situation, and had offered me timely assistance. She gave me a grin as she climbed back up to the roof.

With the seconds Sallia bought me, I finished scampering up the pipe, before flopping over the lip of the roof and collapsing onto the tiles. Even if I didn’t need to breathe and didn’t get tired, the fear and stress I had gone through in the past minute far surpassed anything I had previously experienced. I spent a few moments silently laying on the roof, reveling in the fact that I was still alive.

Meanwhile, Sallia picked up the frying pan that I had dropped. She looked over the side of the building, hefting the frying pan and giving it a menacing twirl. Then, her expression became increasingly bizarre, and she lowered the frying pan.

“Sallia?” I started to feel nervous. I had thought her plan was to knock the skeleton off the roof if it climbed up, but I had no idea why she would lower her frying pan. Even if it couldn’t climb, as Sallia hoped, keeping the frying pan ready just in case would make us safer. Was she under some sort of mental attack? Why was her expression changing into such a strange one? I got up and leaned over the side of the building, trying to figure out what was happening.

There, I saw the skeleton sprawled on the ground.

Huh? Why hadn’t it climbed to its feet yet?

The skeleton climbed to its feet before staring up at us. I wondered why it was so much slower now. It had climbed to its feet nearly instantly after Sallia clobbered it earlier, and it hadn’t seemed very injured. Its jaw clattered angrily as it gave us a death glare, before it turned to the drainpipe. The skeleton placed two hands on the drainpipe, before it tried to mimic our movements. Its movements were slower than ours, but my heart sank as I realized the skeleton could copy our movements. Even if it was slower, we would still need to find a way to deal with this thing, or else it might keep hounding us forever. Then, the skeleton placed one of its feet on the side of the building and began trying to climb its way upwards…

And fell to the ground. I suddenly realized its posture looked eerily familiar…

It turned towards us. Its jaw clattered angrily. It gave us a death glare… again? And then repeated the exact same motions as before, preparing to climb to the roof and stab us. That is, until its feet left the ground, at which point it tumbled to the ground, landing in exactly the same posture as before…It repeated this exact same loop of actions a third time, and then a fourth time.

And then a tenth time...

It then failed a twentieth, and a thirtieth, and a fortieth time. Every single time it fell to the ground, it mimicked almost exactly the same motions, never learning a thing from its previous failures, never trying anything new, and never getting any closer to success.

The terrifying creature that had chased us for over a minute suddenly seemed ridiculous.

“Do you think we’re safe? Also, how did a noblewoman like you learn to climb a drainpipe like that?” I asked, looking at Sallia. Since the Skeleton didn’t look like it would be getting up here anytime soon, my tension was slowly draining away.

“I was… a bit of a feisty child in my younger days. My father always insisted that I conduct myself like a proper lady, so that I could get married to a nice noble family. I… I did not wish to get married to someone I had never met before. When I was nine, I had a rather… questionable solution to this problem. Whenever my father mentioned my future marriage, I climbed the trees in the estate and threw apples at him. He was not amused, so he had the gardeners cut down the trees after I did it enough times.” said Sallia, her eyes gaining a bit of a wistful gleam to them. “I always thought I hated him for trying to make me marry somebody I had never seen before, and how he always pushed me to get married earlier for the good of the family.” Her eyes lost the nostalgic gleam, and her mouth began to uncontrollably curl into a frown. “When he died I realized how much I missed him. Even if we never got along when he was alive, I… I did not wish for him to disappear.” She sighed, before she finally seemed to snap out of it, returning to the present. “Anyway, I think we are safe for the moment. This thing does not seem very intelligent. It keeps making errors at the exact same spot. It has failed forty six… make that forty seven times in a row. I do not think it will be getting up here anytime soon.”

We stood over the side of the building and watched as the skeleton fumbled and fell to the ground again. And again, and again. Finally, I broke the silence again.

“Do you think it’ll just keep trying forever?”

“Hmm…” Sallia looked at the skeleton, before she shrugged. Given how surprisingly formal her speech was, the shrug caught me off-guard when I saw it. “Perhaps? It is difficult to say how this thing will react, but given its odd persistence, it would not surprise me if it simply keeps trying for the rest of eternity.”

The skeleton tumbled the ground another sixteen times. At this point, both of us were very sure the braindead bag of bones wasn’t going to get up here anytime soon.

The fact it never learned from its previous mistakes was encouraging - it meant that tricking any other skeletons we found should be pretty easy.  However, it also meant that the skeleton probably wasn’t going to leave on its own. It would keep chasing us until it died or we died.

“I am starting to regret coming up here,” said Sallia, as she looked at the skeleton on the ground beneath us. “I am a little worried now. We are still slowly eating away at our Achievement, and we only have a few months before our physical bodies deteriorate. This means we already have two different problems that will kill us if we don’t solve them. And if we are stranded up here, we cannot solve either of our problems.”

I checked the amount of Achievement I had remaining, and felt more than a little nervous when I noticed it had gone down by another few fractions of an Achievement point. I was probably losing around about 1 Achievement per day, roughly. In short, if we were stranded on this roof for eight and a half days, I would permanently die. That gave us some wiggle room, but far less than I was comfortable with.

“Hmmm…” I frowned, looking around the house roof we were stuck on. The roof was nice and flat, which made it easy for us to walk around without slipping, but it didn’t have any loose items we could use to escape our situation. The neighboring building was a medieval hut, which I doubted could hold our weight, and the other neighboring roof was too far away from us to jump to it.

Then, I looked down at the roof beneath me. While the building was fairly modern, its roof was made of something quite different from what I was familiar with. The roof tiles seemed to be made of heavy clay bricks. I looked at them for a few more moments, before I got an idea. I gave Sallia a slight grin, and gestured towards the roof tiles.

“I think if we pry off a roof tile or two and throw it at mister bones over there, we can get this thing off our back,” I said. “Even if the roof tiles are pretty tightly packed together, they aren’t stuck together. I think we can pry a few of them up some work.”

Sallia made a slightly dubious expression, before she shook her head and smiled. For a moment, her expression was no longer gentle, ‘polite’ in the way that her smiles had been in the past. She looked at the skeleton, and her grin turned savage, like something one would see from a hardened warrior on the battlefield instead of a polite noblewoman at a ball. “Well, let’s give it a try. Since this thing enjoys chasing us so much, let’s turn its skull into bone dust.” For the first time since I had started talking to her, Sallia dropped her formal speech entirely. However, even though her speech was less formal, she felt more… real now. As if she had been wearing a mask all this time, and she had taken a tiny corner of it off.

It took a few minutes of straining ourselves, as well as scraping my fingers to try to get some purchase. It took almost ten minutes of prying to get the damn roof tile out of its position, but after much struggling we had a block of ammunition.

We looked back over the side of the roof. The skeleton was still trying to climb the drainpipe.

Sallia looked at me, and gave me a feral grin as she handed the heavy roof tile to me. “It was your idea. You do the honors.”

I hefted the tile, getting a feel for its weight. Then, satisfied, I threw it at the bony bastard.

Whoosh! The tile sailed through the air. Then, with a hefty crunch, it smashed into the skeleton’s head. The skeleton immediately collapsed to the ground, before crawling to its feet again. Unlike Sallia’s frying pan attack, this time I could see visible damage to the thing’s skull. It looked like a piece of pottery that had been cracked a few times. I gestured behind me, and Sallia handed me another roof tile.

It took four throws before the skeleton’s skull turned into powder and the thing stopped getting back up. This was partially because I missed a throw, but also due to how sturdy its body was. However, the skeleton was now dead.

I felt something strange mere moments later. A small dribble of energy seemed to sink into my soul.

Another popup box appeared in my vision, disrupting the euphoric feeling before I had time to sink into it.

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You have slain an invading low-level troop. As defined in article two of the emergency city defense fund act, Eluxia distributes your rightful rewards.

(Error – Entity ‘Eluxia’ cannot be found.)

Achievement distribution failed. For further information, please contact the administrator of  your current city.

Slaughter: Killed a skeletal foot soldier for the first time.

Influence: Contributed to the defense of the Market by an [extremely negligible] amount.

Achievement +20, Achievement +0.00

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I looked at the glowing words that appeared in front of me.

What was this?

I turned to look at Sallia, before realizing she was also staring into space, possibly looking at a popup box on her own.

As I read the new popup box, I felt energy continue to trickle into my soul. The feeling intensified, and I quickly realized something.

First, killing the skeleton had given us Achievement. If we could find more skeletons and deal with them, Sallia and I would have a way to solve our most immediate problem. However, gaining achievement was like a cocktail of pleasant emotions. A strange and unnatural concoction of happiness, akin to the first shot of a drug and the euphoria of a first kiss, all welled up inside of me the moment I acquired some Achievement, and the feeling made it hard to control myself. It was like a drug, and the moment I felt it, I wanted more of it.

I shivered, cutting off my train of thought before it could finish. I hadn’t ever thought of Achievement like this before, but it was definitely addictive. If I was distracted by this feeling while surrounded by skeletons, I would definitely lose a life right afterwards.

Getting Achievement was something I needed to do in order to survive. However, it was also dangerous until I found a way to keep hold of my emotions upon acquiring it. I also needed to find a way to dull this sensation outside of battle, or else I might end up prioritizing Achievement over my survival and end up dying because of it.  A drug addict was fundamentally someone who had lost control of their actions. And if getting Achievement was too addictive, it might be just as dangerous as a drug.

I spent almost a solid minute wallowing in a mixture of fear and concern. Then, finally, I refocused on the present. I didn’t know exactly what Achievement was yet, but maybe there was some way to control this feeling. I needed Achievement to survive, so I needed to balance control and survival. I wouldn’t be able to just cut myself off from Achievement entirely, unless I wanted to starve to death. I would revisit this train of thought later, though, when I knew more about the Market and Achievement.

I opened my Status Screen again, to see if anything else had changed. The Attributes remained completely unchanged, as did the items section, but the third section of my Attributes panel now had a little more Achievement in it.

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Lives Remaining: 5

0/10 Keyword Slots used

Glut: 0

Abilities:

Birth Abilities: Gender Control

Temporary Effects:

N/A

Achievement: 8.77 -> 28.65

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I did notice that none of my stats had increased, despite the fact I had physically and mentally exerted myself quite a bit. I had been hoping that perhaps I would get a popup, informing me of a new Skill or Ability or something after the fight. However, nothing of the sort appeared. Clearly, Attributes didn’t increase as a result of exercising or thinking. And it also seemed like I would need to get Abilities through the Market or reincarnations - it didn’t seem like I could get them just from trying things out.

I turned my attention back to the remaining Achievement I had. When I first arrived, it had been at 8.77. I had gained 20 Achievement from killing the skeleton, but I had lost 0.12 Achievement during the few hours Sallia and I had wandered around and fought the skeleton.

I now had 28 days to live instead of 8. Still very short, but I had a lot more room to work with than before.

I shivered, feeling a mixture of nervousness and determination as I looked at my Status Screen. Was 28 days enough? Would I be able to find everything we needed in that time?

I had no idea. However, the skeleton confirmed with resounding certainty that this ruined city was even less peaceful than I had thought. Not only did I need to figure out how to survive Achievement starvation, solve the addictive pleasant sensation I got when I acquired Achievement, and prevent physical deterioration from killing me, but Sallia and I also needed to keep an eye out for nearby skeletons if we didn’t want to get surrounded and killed.