Chapter 39

I blinked sitting up. The night sky was totally different and the two moons gone, nor did I see anything that looked like where I was before. I was no longer on the gnome’s hill that’s for sure.

This was taking some getting used to.

The two moons are beautiful.

But a world of war and crazy monsters all trying to eat humans is not.

I found myself in the dream state’s orc dungeon room where Fox Girl had me fighting orcs like before!

Again it was the same in virtually every other aspect and still somewhat dark, but with torches just enough to barely see while looking a bit scary. I checked over myself and found I had all my things and my equipment. I was also still me. Somehow I’d activated the dream state after going to sleep again. Would it activate every time I went to sleep? It must have some kind of rules and a concrete system right?

It would take time and trial and error to iron out what those boundaries were and how they worked. Though it was redundant to check that I still didn’t know how this worked. I couldn’t ignore anything that might give me hints about it.

There were signs that it was a dream state however. Like the torches never seemed to burn down and extinguish, but in real life they should hiss or spit sometimes from the pine pitch in them on top of having the ability to never run out of fuel. But I noticed the interval between the spitting of the pine pitch was exactly the same number of seconds every time. In reality it would be more random.

I’d have to trick Fox Girl into revealing some of those boundaries. Was it also true that if I acted like I already knew about something she’d be more willing to talk about it, since she didn’t perceive she could actively say no?

“Are you going to stare off in space forever? Time is precious you know. We have a lot to do,” she said impatiently.

“We do? I mean yes, of course,” I was surprised that she was ready to help me and already moving us forward. But as always it was reluctant help with a sort of smug and sarcastic spark to her soul.

There fox girl was waiting with her hands on her hips. Again the robe was the same as before except somehow she was showing off her magic power and had turned it to be the same color as her tails. “I thought you’d show up about now,” she said, as if she had a watch in her head.

“Are you showing off your power?” I pointed to the robe, playfully with a smirk.

“Oh do you like it? You’ll never touch it of course. Die a virgin kid,” She smiled.

She then flipped me off.

Was she trying to goad me? She might be testing me. She wasn’t walking away or taking her eyes off me but if she’d truly hated me she’d just move on to other things wouldn’t she? I couldn’t be sure though because the die a virgin curse is pretty hateful to say.

Maybe she just didn’t like being a prisoner. I hadn’t expected such attitude from her. I guess it’s expected though since she’d been fighting the previous owner for so long.

Sigh…

“Hey I need your help again please,” I pleaded hoping she’d not act up.

“What is it this time?” she sighed.

I briefly explained what had happened since I’d seen her last.

“Wow, all that happened in just one day? Humans sure do stay busy. Busy indeed...” She seemed shocked after I described what had happened.

“Still you have shown some pretty good resilience and quick thinking,” she murmured.

“Well I’m having trouble. This isn’t normal for humans either by the way. We lost our people that can interpret the Egyptian writing and the blue screens. One is a traitor and the other missing. It’s caused a lot of trouble for us. The gnome understands and speaks Egyptian but because it’s not his primary skill and he just got it recently from becoming an elder he can’t do the writing systems yet.”

“So you are back to square one. If anything is even remotely similar to your situation before this is actually worse since you don’t have a building you can fortify yourselves in. Plus you are in the middle of an orc siege,” she shook her head, while she walked around thinking.

“So help me through this please,” I pleaded.

“I told you the demon box is evil and corrupts people. What did you to expect?” she answered harshly.

I still couldn’t break down her attitude despite being nice.

Tch…

“But it’s also true that anyone else who has it after me is going to be much worse and harder to deal with than the demon box. I at least am trying to work things out with you,” I said.

She stopped suddenly. “You’re right. That’s the harsh reality of this bad situation.” Her shoulders slumped forward. “I can’t believe I’m considering this. Look, don’t make me regret this.” She gave me a warning look. It reminded me that she wasn’t fully with me. She was just cooperating with me for temporary common goals; namely her escape from the demon box and me being in a position to still be able to survive while achieving that goal. If I died after all, she’d be in worse trouble than I was in now.

I briefly wondered if there was a way to get her to work with me beyond temporary goals. I didn’t like the idea that once those temporary goals were gone she’d leave for sure.

“Well the best thing to do first would be to improve your combat and defense skills,” she said after deciding it on her own.

“So you’ll teach me a skill?” I hoped.

“More like we’ll work on your basic combat abilities first,” she said with a smirk.

So first we went through sparring of all kinds. She first had me practice on orcs, but not the runty little ones. She summoned the larger ones that had been tougher and stronger, but thankfully didn’t make me fight the ogre again.

But the problem was that she was merciless. I had to work tirelessly trying to just survive. Was she really on my side? It seems like she was trying to kill me! She practically made me run to death. It was hell training after all.

First, she ran me against only one of them. When I had killed that one orc, then she changed the pace. Now she was making two orcs at a time after that go after me. Then next she gave them better weapons, for the third round while I was sweating like crazy. Then she gave them some pieces of armor, and they were drunken with rage after that.

“Let me catch my breath,” I pleaded.

“Hell no! You think the orcs will let you stop for a break?!” she screeched back at me.

“Please!”

“Nope, that’s not how it works to get stronger. If you have no risk, you can’t grow,” she taunted.

“Please!”

Still she didn’t let up, and even seemed to get angry. “Work harder! Faster! Stronger! If you don’t win, you don’t eat!”

Was this how her mom raised her I wondered? Actually even though Fox Girl was pretty, I was starting to regret chasing after her…yep, I was definitely not going to date her I decided after several more minutes of her regime. Of course if I asked her if her mom was like this that would surely invite harsher treatment than I was already experiencing, I believed.

No amount of pain was too great, and she succeeded in getting me to remain focused on the orcs. We kept going for a while. I also found that resting in the dream state had sort of a refreshing effect that felt good, when it was time to take breaks between sets of orcs.

“Your technique is all wrong too. You keep leaving openings in your defense. You need to firm up your axe swing blocks and parrying. If you keep going like that sooner or later something will go through and you’ll get killed,” she spat angrily.

Then she tripped one of the orcs deliberately to stop it from hurting me.

Ah, maybe she did truly care after all? I had almost expected she’d give the orc a pat on the back for a few minutes.

After more sparring I observed her sometimes intervening again when the orcs were starting to get the upper hand over me. It was happening more often than I wanted to admit. But because they were her orcs they paid her no attention whatsoever.

I couldn’t understand her attitude. Sometimes she was helping but sometimes adversarial?

She made me then follow her movement while she had me practicing blocking better. It came to the point where it was so important that she made lunges at me herself with no orcs present with me only practicing parrying and blocks.

“Wouldn’t it be better to do smaller and weaker orcs first?” I asked.

She shook her head, “people become stronger by looking up, not down. That’s why you’ll be able to use that heal ability to good effect. You can use it for leverage against stronger opponents and your growth will be better by focusing on something tougher than you too.”

Dang.

“I want your blocking and defense skill to improve so much that nothing gets through. Absolutely nothing!” she seemed to have an unnatural wickedness in her eye as she said it.

*Gulp* I knew what that look meant.

“But shouldn’t it be better to focus on like magic or an ability?” I wondered.

She shook her head. “Even if we did that it won’t keep you alive. Skills and abilities cost magic power. Most students die with sometimes top rank ‘creme of the crop’ godly skills because they lack basic defense and survival skills. Believe me, for now focus on the basics. We’ll get to those things later,…if you live of course,” she added.

“How will we know when it’s good enough?” I asked, but suddenly regretted it seeing the pure evil look she was giving me.

“That’s a good question. You will soon find out the answer to that…”

We stayed like that for at least another hour and then some. My shirt was drenched in sweat. I’d ended up having to use my heal ability at least twice from falling in the dirt and giving myself some awful rug burn. Then I had to use it again against an orc cutting me after it got through my defense. That all happened despite Fox Girl watching out for me.

If she hadn’t been here I might have died or become incapacitated. It turns out that I was still pretty weak.

Was it real sweat I wonder? When I wake up will the sweat and some of the wound be gone or mitigated?

But that left all kinds of questions for me again. Before they’d said that to them in stasis of the demon box it was like the orc boss was only with them an hour. But I was with Fox Girl more than an hour just now.

Was that related to how much mana someone had? Or was it just how much time I wanted to be here with her? Also when I finished with her how much time will have passed in reality? I would have to go over it again because the arguments of the Fox Girl and Sunghee were entirely what they saw and experienced and might be like less than half of what’s really going on.

After awhile I had to ask her though…

“Hey will there be any gain on this? When I wake up will this just be wasted effort since it’s a dream?” I said.

“Oh, you think this is a dream? It’s actually a nightmare!” she seemed to enjoy saying, sending more orcs after me again like before. It was the welcome-to-hell-wish-you-were-dead program. There weren’t that many of them but I wondered if they were like super buffed or something?

“Actually there will be a lot of gain. Anything you gain or get better at here in the demon box dream realm will carry over into reality. Its physics after all, you are putting in effort here and that effort is taking shape in your brain and neural pathways even though the orcs are illusions,” she said finally with confidence.

“They sure don’t hit like illusions,” I said remembering how heavy some of their blows felt when they went up against me.

“That’s because my ability to alter reality is pretty high level,” she said smugly.

“So if you get hurt in a dungeon by an illusion, it’s still an illusion right? What happens when I live but I wake up?” I questioned.

She gave me a serious look, “look, you need to be careful of that type of thing. Illusions even if they are semi-real can still get you hurt but you won’t die most likely. It depends a bit on the person that created them too. More than likely what will happen is you will have a mitigated sore spot, like when you wake up you will only feel sore where you were wounded, unless it crosses a critical point? It’s confusing too at first as you are struggling against it. But the higher level and rank the illusion is the more real the pain and injury start to become. That’s also why I can make you feel hell on earth and why you’ll be fine when you wake up…mostly.”

Gulp*

Wonder what the critical point is?

“So it becomes real?” I ask. I didn’t like how she slipped in that mostly at the end.

She nodded, “Think about it like its approaching realism in infinity on like a math graph, but like just barely below it somehow. The higher the power the closer it approaches the line but doesn’t cross into it. It’s like saying 1.7, 1.8,1.9, 1.99, 1.999 but not quite at 2.0. Of course that’s describing really high level illusions, but if it’s really shabby like a beginner it might not even be anywhere near close to the real thing.”

“I’m not sure I understand it the way you do. So basically, is there a way to bring you guys out of the demon box to have you help me get stronger?” I said.

Fox girl considered this, eyeing me carefully and watching my reaction. She stopped and seemed to be thinking about something. She sighed after awhile, “actually there is. But the problem is I don’t know if I can trust you yet with that information. If I give you everything all at once you may not appreciate it or end up just blowing it off as too easy and betraying me. Plus you have to unlock it anyway through getting more powerful.”

“Don’t I have some power right now?” I asked.

She raised an eyebrow, “well in a newborn sort of way. Right now your ability seems similar to a young child among my kind. So it’s not good enough yet. You lack a lot of basics.”

“But what about the other crystals with girls in them? One of them can be a test to see if I treat them well. Then if so you and I can progress to help each other more with each of you and show you I can be trusted. Tell me about unlocking them,” I said.

She twitched her lips funny and thought about it for a minute. She seemed to be really torn by inner conflict. “This is like dealing with the devil. The more powerful you become the harder it will be for me to control.”

“I’d like to be able to survive,” I reminded her.

She nodded, thinking about it.

“Why do you think you have to control me, or me you? You don’t have to control anything. If you help me more in the beginning I will have a higher chance of remembering your loyalty and having a lasting cooperation,” I answered.

“What you said is intriguing but it’s also true that the most people end up in betrayal,” she replied slowly.

Dang. She didn’t go for it. OK, I’d try to lean slowly into her way of thinking and draw her out.

“I agree with that kind of. People suck and can be kind of mean, but that doesn’t mean we have to follow them,” I said.

Actually I was quite surprised. I was more afraid of betrayal than she was but she didn’t realize it because she had that fear too. Perhaps that meant there was a chance? She actually seemed to have real feelings and be a real person too. Someone who had been hurt before would fear betrayal.

“Come with me. Just make sure you remember that I’m only doing this because my tribe thinks healers or shamans are sacred,” she said finally while acting annoyed.

Ah, so that’s why she was so conflicted and why she’d even considered it in the first place. I hadn’t figured that there might be another variable influencing her behavior.

“Where are we going?” I said.

She stopped in her tracks but wasn’t facing me, “actually you aren’t going to like this. It’s going to be very sad.”

She snapped her fingers.

The wall suddenly distorted and got like wavy like it does when you feel and see heat above a campfire. However unlike a campfire this was like an inky shadowy distortion on the wall that had formed in place of the stone wall of the room from before.

She pulled me with her holding my hand like I was a kid she didn’t want to get lost.

We found ourselves in a cell just like the one where was Sunghee was, except this wasn’t Sunghee. It was a different girl.

She had once been pretty but she was suffering terribly now. It looked like the start of some kind of medical shock.

“Eh? What is this?” I asked confused.

“It’s the price of the orc boss’s behavior on the innocent. If you become like him this can happen to others because of you too,” Fox Girl said cryptically. She was pointing at the girl.

I stayed silent, not responding.

Before me there was literally what looked like a dying girl. She was like making a soft sound in her mouth similar to moaning except barely audible and chained up in a bed exactly the same way as Sunghee naked and unable to move. She had also wounds all over her body with blood everywhere on the bed.

But even while seeing her suddenly out of thin air another wound opened up on her shoulder. Her naked body was slowly receiving new wounds like once every ten seconds, while spurts of blood went off in the air.

“It’s sad isn’t it?” Fox Girl asked.

Then another wound appeared, while the girl gurgled in pain and then blood came out of her mouth.

“She’s dying?” I guessed.

Fox Girl shrugged, “I wasn’t sure if it would be a good idea to show this. But in the end it was already about to happen while I was debating it. I also thought it would be good to for you to understand the demon box pockets can only bend reality so much. It finally burst. She isn’t dying yet, but will be in a few minutes once all those wounds from the pocket dimensions add up.”

“Eh? What burst?”

She pointed to the girl in really bad shape with the terrible wounds. “Basically the sum of all the wounds over time and all the damage done by the previous owner of the demon box came to a bursting point where it had collected too much suffering to absorb from the girl’s body anymore. In other words the interest growing from the damage was higher than the regeneration rate, thereby becoming cancerous and building up like a bubble swelling up. I’d been aware of it for some time but she was trying to hang on. For it to contain the damage it has to be able to hold it in in a manageable amount but in this case it had become cancerous because it was beyond the girl’s ability to contain in her mind in addition to the damage interest growth within the pocket reality.”

Fox Girl seemed pretty upset. I could see it in her eyes, even though she was trying to mask it. Then she was biting her lip too, and her finger nails.

“Can you save her?” I asked.

She shook her head, “I already tried. No. I’ve slowed it down a few minutes but maybe that will make her suffer more. If I knew it wasn’t going to work I would have ended her pain faster.”

“But I could try to heal her with your power added to mine?” I suggested.

She again shook her head, “right now you don’t have enough mana pool and your heal non-stop right now is still less than the ‘interest’ growth of the cancerous damage. It’s beyond too late even if you’d known to prevent this a week ago.”

“This is so sad,” I said also feeling it.

“Wait, can you absorb her energy?” I asked.

“Why would you want me to steal someone’s life force?! What the hell are you thinking? That’s forbidden magic!” she looked at me like I was crazy. The stern evil eye look had returned.

“Maybe I worded it bad. I meant can you hurry and harness what’s left of her dying life force to save Sunghee? Since she’s already dying and can’t be saved, maybe her death can save another. She’d want that wouldn’t she?”

Suddenly she looked at the girl thoughtfully. “Well my power is reality altering. What you are suggesting makes sense. It will be hard but I might be able to do some, but not much. What do you have in mind?”

I worded things carefully not wanting to phrase parts of it very well, but knew I had to make her understand, “when I saw Sunghee last she was in despair about worried she couldn’t leave the demon box for several reasons, including the orcs violating her. Since this girl is already dying, we could use the dissipating life force from her death to boost Sunghee’s life force and preserve her from the damage she’s received right?”

The fox girl paced for a bit. Then she scratched something in the dirt. It seemed she was doing some kind of math for a few minutes. I was about to ask more but she held up her hand to not let me break her concentration.

Then she chuckled. “OK, there is a way to do this. It may actually work. But there’s a price. Sunghee has to agree to this. I can’t believe what I’m doing…this is normally dark magic kind of spell work,” she said negatively like she’d just shoplifted from a store.

“Agreed. Isn’t it good if we can help her?” I said.

“Not so fast. You also are tied into the spell too. It will use part of your life force, with Sunghee’s, and the dying girls. It might be messy. It’s kind of a called shot spell and those take a lot of runic inscriptions and managing to somehow wing it. I had to tie you in because the math of having enough sum of total mana wasn’t good enough from Sunghee’s alone.”

It seemed Fox Girl didn’t really like what she was doing. Her nose was scrunched up. But she gave in.

“Oh.” That didn’t sound good.

It took a few minutes of bouncing between rooms before we could arrange things.

When Fox Girl brought me to Sunghee’s….room…she cried out with joy after hearing the idea. Especially she was pleading for her to have the life force take the orc filth out of her. After all she’d been deathly afraid of being pregnant by orcs, plus the buildup of her wounds. She was practically worshiping us from that. It wasn’t that great of a success rate still and she was still happy, even though Fox Girl told her she could die in the process.

She didn’t seem to care about that part in exchange for getting rid of the orc filth. Plus she didn’t care that Fox Girl told her she’d be barren and not be able to have kids…

That part was a surprise. Was that why Fox Girl had been reluctant from the start?

I tried not to stare at her while we talked…it was hard…not to. Sunghee had wonderful boobs of course.

Then Fox Girl had to prepare the necessary markings. She had to hurriedly paint Egyptian magic symbols on the dying girl, and on me, and on Sunghee before working it out.

Then she activated some kind of magic spell in a language I didn’t understand.

There was a big flash of light as the magic worked…

Before it was time to wake up Fox Girl gave me an additional warning.

“Don’t do anything to change things in the dream pockets yet. If you do the demonic nature of the box will challenge you and with how weak you are now, you won’t be even stand a chance to fight back.”

“Change things? I didn’t know I could change things…” suddenly my head was full of ideas.

“Yeah of course you can. But every change is pushing against the resistance of the box, and the box is partly alive. So it will fight back. Even something simple like changing items in the room can ignite its power. You mustn’t try to change anything until I think you are strong enough for resisting the box lashing back against you. Ah, but I’m so tired,” her voice seemed like it was floating away.

“Oh I almost forgot. One more thing to show you,” she said hurriedly.