The Shade of Angelus: Undying Lairs, #3

By Rob Steiner

Chris Able--as the Paladin character Mace Phoenix--has leveled up and then some. With new skills and magic items, he's ready to move on to The Tomb's next challenge.

 

He'll need every bit of his new powers to rescue his friends. 

 

Captured by someone Chris thought he could trust, his friends could be anywhere on a dangerous level that surprises even his long RPG experience. With new monsters to fight and bosses to battle, Chris must use his "Master" Rank and Mace's wisdom to rescue his friends from the soul-devouring rulers of Level Three.

 

But while doing so, Chris makes a terrible mistake that threatens all of existence.  

 

Can Chris work with Mace's personality to rescue his friends and defeat the demi-god Angelus who might not be what he seems?

 

THE SHADE OF ANGELUS is the third book in the Undying Lairs LitRPG series, a must-read for fans of C.M. Carney, Sean Oswald, and Harmon Cooper. Grab your copy of Rob Steiner's thrilling magical adventure today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rob Steiner
• Release date: Nov 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223100942

Rob Steiner

Rob Steiner lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with his wife, daughter, and a rascal cat. He is the author of the Journals of Natta Magus series, about a wizard from an alternate twenty-first century who is stranded in Augustan Rome. Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show featured two stories about Natta Magus: "The Oath-Breaker's Daemon" and "The Cloaca Maxima." He also wrote the alt-history/space opera Codex Antonius series (Muses of Roma, Muses of Terra, and Muses of the Republic) about a Roman Empire that spawns an interstellar civilization. Be among the first to hear about Rob's new releases by signing up for his "New Release Mailing List" on his web site below. He won't share your info with anyone, and he'll only email you when a new book or story comes out.

Book preview

The Shade of Angelus

Undying Lairs | Book 3

Rob Steiner

Quarkfolio Books

Copyright © 2023 by Rob Steiner.

All rights reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from Rob Steiner.

December 2023. Published by Quarkfolio Books.

Cover illustration and design by Miblart.com (miblart.com). Editing by David Drazul (daviddrazul.com).

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Contents

1.Don't dream it's over

2.Anyone see an Abyss around here?

3.Falling for you

4.Level Three and the mystery guide

5.We couldn't get much higher

6.Seems a bit narrow

7.True motives

8.Minions of the Fey Lords

9.A cultural faux pas

10.Key to the temple

11.Into the Primal Pillars

12.Acting!

13.Oh, bugger

14.So close

15.That's probably fine...

16.Chaos ensues

17.To believe or not to believe

18.Softy or idiot

19.A not-so-happy reunion

20.Where's our stuff?

21.Impulse control

22.The first date

23.On the road again

24.Smoky

25.A favor owed

26.Have fun storming the castle

27.Smartly

28.Off to the races

29.A familiar yet unwelcome spell

30.It's a theory

31.Who should we call?

32.Let's do this

33.Battle at the gates

34.Worse than a cave-in

35.Scorpions or spiders?

36.Promises, promises

37.A way out

38.Hot mess

39.A ray of hope

40.Lifeboat

41.True power

42.A tempting offer

43.Unlocked potential

44.One

45.The Battle of the Seam

46.Unite as kin

47.Fey Lord throwdown

48.The law is the law

49.Hit it all at once

50.Hope from the forest

51.Swarm

52.A terrible certainty

53.Together again

Afterword

Acknowledgements

Chapter one

Don't dream it's over

I’ll spare you the whole it was all a dream twist at the end of this chapter and tell you right now that what you’re about to read was all a dream. With that out of the way, here goes.

I crouched near the bottom of a grassy hill beneath a blue sky. I ran my fingers through the tall grass and dug them deep into the cool, soft earth. Pulling them back, I saw loamy black soil that would’ve been any farmer’s field of dreams. After suffering through The Tomb’s stifling, quiet, and sunless depths, it had felt like years since I’d been outside.

I thought, This is beautiful ground. Too bad today it will be fertilized by blood.

Then I stood and scanned the fields around me. Immediately behind me were my blue-cloaked Ancestral Paladin officers who my dream-self knew personally but my Earthly self, Chris Able, didn’t recognize. Behind them were hundreds of Ancestral Paladin soldiers, all wearing armor and bronze-colored helmets that gleamed in the morning sun. The first ranks held tall spears, their steel tips shining. All the paladins had swords at their sides and a shield on their backs over their blue cloaks. They spread along the hillside several hundred paces to my left and right.

Beyond where my paladin legion ended on my left, I saw another army, this one made of rough, armorless men and women wearing leather bracers and brandishing axes, their painted faces screaming curses toward the bend in the valley in front of us. A tall red-headed woman stood front and center, similar to where I stood among my Ancestral Paladins. Our eyes connected over the distance, and she raised her ax to me in a salute. I raised my Ancestral Longsword to her.

I turned to the right. Past the end of my legion stood an army of dwarves carrying spears similar to my paladins and armored in radiant chain shirts. While my paladins wore blue cloaks, the dwarves wore gold and white garments. Their dress matched their leader standing in the middle, a gray-haired dwarf who looked my way just like the red-headed woman had. He raised his mace to me, and I gave him a similar salute with my longsword.

I turned around and squinted into the sun at the hilltop above and behind the three armies in the valley. About a hundred people stood ten feet apart, facing the valley. None wore a uniform, unless you considered robes and tunics made of multi-colored, mismatched fabric a uniform. In their center stood a skinny man with long black hair hanging over his eyes. If I didn’t know he was the most powerful wizard among his people, I would’ve thought him a beggar. I could see him looking in my direction, so I raised my sword to him. He didn’t do anything, just continued to stare at me. I knew he saw me, and I knew he was ready too.

I turned and faced the bend in the valley ahead of us where the monsters would come.

The valley was about a quarter mile wide and surrounded by steep, grassy hills. Beyond the hills on each side rose tall, snow-tipped mountains. My dream-self knew that we had maneuvered the monsters into this valley to force them into one contained space and possibly nullify their numerical advantage. While my dream self was confident in the strength of the four armies around him, he knew that the enemy’s numbers could easily overwhelm us if we fought in a wide-open field. It was a risky strategy, given how Qavalon’s capital city was less than a mile behind the wizards at my back.

While the morning sun lit the sky behind me, the sky in the direction I faced was darkening by the moment, as if a massive forest fire was consuming every tree. But the darkness didn’t float through the bend in the valley. Instead, it formed above the valley like a terrible thunderstorm. Red and orange lightning flashed within the clouds flowing toward us. A large peal of thunder shook the ground and echoed down the valley. I could sense the paladins around me flinch and shift in their formations.

You are stronger than them, I shouted, keeping my eyes on the roiling clouds ahead. You are the elite of the Ancestral ranks. We will stop the monsters here, today. Your deeds and bravery will be sung about for generations. I am with you, your Ancestors are with you, and above all you are with each other. Today is the day Angelus falls!

Nobody cheered, for that would’ve been unseemly among Ancestral Paladins. Let the barbarian army to our left scream and cheer and curse. But I glanced to my left and right and noticed chins of the paladins in the front ranks were a little higher. The fear was still there—they wouldn’t be human if it weren’t—but there was also resolve to fight to the last. They knew the stakes. And that was what mattered.

Thunder rumbled again, shaking the air and the ground. But this time there was another rumble in the ground that had nothing to do with the thunder. The rumble grew stronger, and I knew it was coming from the bend in the darkening valley ahead. The monsters had arrived.

Form up, I ordered my captains next to me.

They began shouting orders to their officers and paladin soldiers. My front ranks marched forward in a crisp, straight line, passing me and stopping thirty paces in front of me. The second ranks then marched forward and stood a few paces behind the first ranks, but staggered so that when the time came, they could lower their long spears through the spaces between the shoulders of the first ranks.

Once the first and second ranks were in formation, the third and final rank moved forward and stood to either side of me. The third rank did not hold spears, but they were armored and wore swords in sheathes at their belts. They stood in formation with their hands resting on the hilts of their swords.

We all stood on a slight slope at the base of the hill, so I could see above the first and second ranks in front of me.

The rumble from the bend in the valley grew louder, and I caught the faint stench of death and shit on the breeze.

Here they come, I thought.

A wave of pink-skinned creatures came pouring from around the bend in the valley. From my distance it was hard to pick out exactly what they looked like, but me and my dream-self knew exactly what they were. They were the scout reavers that my friends and I had fought outside Kol Baduhr in The Tomb’s Level Two. The monsters had pink skin, four misshapen limbs, and were completely hairless. Each limb had three fingers tipped with black claws. Their wide mouths were filled with jagged teeth that clicked and chattered every time they swung their arms.

And there were thousands of them, all galloping toward us in a sickly pink wave.

My captains shouted more orders, and the spears of my paladin front ranks snapped downward so that their steel heads were pointed at the oncoming monsters. I glanced to my right and saw the dwarf army also lower their spears. Then I glanced to my left and noted the red-haired woman standing in the very front of her ranks, facing her warriors and screaming something to them. They replied with raucous cheers and curses and their red-painted faces looked almost as terrifying as the scout reavers flooding toward us.

Give them the signal, I said to the young paladin next to me. He raised a five-foot-long spear, unfurled a bright blue banner at the tip, and raised it into the air. He twirled the banner in a circle three times and then pointed the spear tip toward the wave of monsters.

A moment later a wave of nausea swept over me, and judging by the grunts from the paladins nearby, it affected them too. Though the Krait wizards stood a few hundred paces away, so many of them drawing on their Krait magic at once was enough to make any paladin in a half mile sick. I didn’t need to turn around to know that each one of the wizards on the hilltop were encased in a black, oily mist.

And then a moment after the nausea, hundreds of bright orange fireballs flew over my head and into the cresting wave of scout reavers less than a quarter mile from my army’s front ranks. The fireballs slammed into the front line of scout reavers, knocking many backward into their comrades, engulfing some in flames. But for every scout reaver they killed, ten more seemed to take its place from the wave behind them.

Paladins, I shouted. Let’s show the Krait wizards what a light show really is!

I couldn’t help myself with that bit of bravado. It was the resultant mix of my terror over seeing that wave of monsters coming toward me and my legion, the excitement that finally battle was joined with Angelus’s minions, and the honor of knowing that for good or ill, I was a part of the history being made today.

My paladins in the third rank showed more decorum than me and quietly called on the magic in their Ancestral blood to form spheres of bright blue, undulating light. I also held my hands out, palms up, and felt my Ancestral magic flow from my heart into the space between my hands. The blue sphere swirled into existence before me, the lightning inside straining to get out.

Release! I cried.

Dozens of blue spheres shot toward the oncoming wave of monsters, and once they cleared the first two ranks of paladins, blue lighting exploded from each one into the scout reaver ranks. Pieces of the creatures flew in all directions, along with the grass and beautiful soil that should’ve been planted with wheat or barley seeds instead of the monsters’ foul blood. Each sphere blew craters out of the ground that waves of monsters fell into or had to scramble up and over, slowing them down even more. The lightning spheres soon lost their strength and slowly dissipated into the morning breeze.

My paladins and I had killed hundreds of monsters, but hundreds more just took their place. I could hear their hissing and growls above the rumbling stampede of their charge, and their stench only worsened.

An ululating cry went up from the barbarian army to my left. I glanced over and saw the red-headed woman running up and down the ranks of her warriors, slapping their outstretched axes with her own. The barbarians were likely heartened that the magical attacks of the wizards and the paladins had not thinned the monster ranks as much as we had all hoped. That meant greater glory for them once battle turned hand-to-hand. They were straining to rush out there now. But I knew the red-headed woman’s antics were meant to not only fire them up into a frenzy but keep them distracted for just a little longer.

You’ll get your chance, my barbarian allies, I thought. But we have one thing to try…

I scanned the quickly closing gap between my first ranks and the monster wave. The valley field between us was mainly grassy with some bushes here and there. But on the hill to my right was a thicket of broad, green bushes that stood out against the light green grasses—the perfect marker for our next tactic.

For my dream-self remembered that this valley had been the primary route of invading armies to the capital city for centuries, before Qavalon was united under one sovereign. Uncounted battles had been fought on this ground, and thousands of warriors had died here throughout the millennia. Many of their bodies still lay where they had fallen, buried in the soft soil by the trampling boots of succeeding armies and the rainy seasons that reformed the churned earth around them. It was why the ground was so beautiful. And why no one in Qavalon dared to plant their crops here.

With the roiling black skies just a few hundred feet above them, the scout reaver wave crossed the line in the valley marked by the broad thicket of bushes. A twinge of disgust ran through my dream-self at what was about to happen.

But he thought to himself, Desperate times…

When the first scout reavers crossed the line, the soft soil exploded all around them as skeletal figures leaped out of the ground and into the ranks of the monsters. More skeletal hands reached out of the ground and grabbed the loping feet of the scout reavers, pulling them down so that more skeletons could jump out of the ground and tear the monsters to pieces with their bony fingers. The skeletons were of all different shapes and species: There were human-sized skeletons and dwarf skeletons. The skeletons of horses jumped out of the ground in a spray of dirt and then trampled through the monster ranks. The skeletons of wolves, bears, and some kind of large rodents that might have been badgers joined the ranks of warrior skeletons tearing through the scout reavers. And while every skeleton seemed slightly different from the next, the one thing they had in common was a sickly green light emanating from their empty eye sockets.

The undead sprayed from the ground like a fire hose and seemed to have stopped the wave of scout reavers in their tracks.

A circle of green light formed on the ground between my paladins and the churning ground of undead. A tall woman floated up from the circle with her hands and palms up as if riding an elevator platform. Her back was to me, but I could see she had an iron crown on her bald, gray head, and she wore a gray and black gown that at once seemed ancient and elegant. Her hands glowed with the same sickly green light showing from her undead minions’ eyes.

Though disgusted by the lich’s use of the dead as a weapon, my dream-self could not help but be impressed with the results. The lich had promised that her undead army would stop the scout reaver attack cold, and she had kept that promise. The skeletons flying from the ground seemed as unending as the scout reaver swarms. I couldn’t see one scout reaver that had made it past the line of undead.

It left me both relieved and uneasy. My dream-self recalled making some promise to the lich—one that I couldn’t remember—and prayed that she would keep her side of the bargain. For there was no way Qavalon could fight her and her minions if she chose not to.

A worry for another day, my dream-self thought. The postures and faces of the paladins in the ranks around me relaxed slightly. I heard howls of disappointment from the barbarians to my left, and the dwarf army to my right began thumping their spears into the ground in a grudging salute to the lich’s successful attack.

I couldn’t see much behind the spray of scout reaver parts that flew around the undead horde wall, for the black skies beyond the wave’s crest put deep shadows over their rear echelons.

They can’t have much more left, my dream-self thought.

The lich must’ve thought the same, for she turned around and seemed to glide over the light green grass toward the paladin ranks. A smirk played across her gruesome, skeletal mouth. I began to make my way through the front ranks of my legion to meet her in front of them. As the lich glided toward me, her undead horde behind her continued to grind up the scout reavers like a wood chipper.

When she got to within a dozen paces, my dream-self said over the din of the battle, Impressive, lich. Your promise has been kept.

As I told you, Paladin, she said in a raspy voice. Your mortal forces were not needed today. My troops are inexhaustible…

Her words trailed off as she must’ve noted my dream-self’s expression. I was staring into the roiling black clouds just above the battlefront and had noted a red glow in the sky that brightened into a burning inferno.

A lance of terrible red light shot from out of the clouds and wrapped itself around the neck of the lich like a bullwhip. The lich’s milky, undead eyes bulged at me for a moment, and then she was yanked hundreds of feet into the air and disappeared into the black clouds.

It had happened so fast. I drew my Ancestral Longsword from the sheath at my belt and then tapped my Ancestral blood for the magic that would protect my legion and me.

Before the magic began to swell in me, the roiling black clouds parted above the battle between the monsters and the undead.

Angelus appeared.

He had feathered wings with a span equal to an Earthly 747. His feathers were white but had a dark tint that I couldn’t tell whether it was the wings themselves or a product of the shadows produced by the clouds around them. His body was humanoid, armored, and massive. Angelus must’ve stood at least fifteen feet tall from head to foot. Thick gray, scaled armor covered his entire body, and a dark gray hood over his head cast his actual face in shadow. But I could see the red glow of his eyes within that hood.

He held the head of the lich in one massive, armored hand, with the other holding the whip he had used to pull her into the sky. As soon as he flew out of the black clouds, he hovered in the sky above the battle, his wings spread wide and still, his body held afloat by magic rather than aerodynamics.

Once he stopped, his hooded face and red eyes scanned the four armies before him. And then with a quick motion, he tore the lich’s head from her body with a flick of his hands. He dropped the head and body to the grass below him.

The sickly green glow emanating from the undead horde winked out, and all the skeletons collapsed into piles of bones. The scout reavers that had survived the slaughter resumed their charge, scampering over the gruesome mounds of their dead comrades and formerly animated skeletons as if they were no more than twigs in a forest.

Angelus then floated to the ground and stood tall with his wings spread out. He landed next to the lich’s body and then kicked it out of the way. The body sailed through the air and hit the wide thicket of bushes that we had used as the marker for the lich to launch her undead hordes.

He walked toward us with his arms held out as though he were surrendering, but I knew he wasn’t. Though greatly diminished, his monsters still numbered in the hundreds, and all seemed to stop as one just a few dozen paces behind him.

I held my ground, even though every instinct in my dream-self wanted to run.

I offered you peace, came a deep, though seductively pleasant voice from Angelus’s dark hood. The voice seemed to roll through the valley like a warm ocean breeze. I offered you friendship. I could feel his armored feet impact the ground. I offered you all the riches you could desire. He stopped about twenty paces from me. And you rejected me.

Your peace means our slavery, I shouted. You were meant to protect us, not rule us, Angelus.

I had no idea what that meant, but it was loaded with history that my dream-self seemed to know.

This is a tired argument, Paladin, Angelus rumbled, a twinge of anger deepening his tone and causing it to reverberate painfully in my head. "Accept my peace, and you can all return to your homes. To your families who miss you and worry about you with all their hearts. All you have to do is give it to me."

My dream-self knew what Angelus was doing. He wasn’t speaking to me as much as the armies before him, preying on their fears and longings to be with their loved ones rather than fight this war. Those longings were there, no doubt, for my dream-self felt them too. I could sense strong memories of a farm where he grew up before he pledged his vows to the Ancestral Paladins. He longed to be back there, tilling the fields rather than fighting horrific monsters.

And the it Angelus asked for was something I would die a torturous death before I gave to him.

Within seconds of Angelus’s offer, a wave of nausea swept over me, and I grinned up at the towering demigod. I think you have your answer, demon.

Waves of fireballs from the Krait wizards, fire trailing each one like small comets, crested above my paladins and then shot down toward Angelus. He drew a dark sword as long as one of the spears carried by my legion, and its blade ignited into a white fire. He swept it once through the air before him just as the first wave of fireballs was about to strike him. The fireballs stopped mid-air, then turned, and shot back toward the Krait wizards. I turned in horror to see the fireballs strike the hilltop, where the wizards had been standing, with far more power than I knew the fireballs contained. The hilltop erupted in flames and dirt, and bodies flew in all directions, similar to how the scout reavers had fared. I searched desperately for the wizard with the long, black hair but couldn’t pick him out of the carnage.

A howl arose from the barbarians on my left. This turn of events was too much for their straining discipline, and they charged forward in an ax-wielding mob of frothing rage. Not even the red-haired woman could hold back any longer, for she led their charge.

Angelus brought his white-flamed sword around in a sweeping motion toward the charging barbarians. A fan of white flames shot out of it, enveloping every barbarian in the mob, including the red-haired leader. Howls of agony arose from the barbarians as they fell to the ground, trying to roll away the flames consuming them. The flames wouldn’t die, but the barbarians did. It only took a few seconds for them all to turn into blackened heaps of bones on the burning grass.

Then Angelus produced the whip he had used to grab the lich, swung it above his head, and lashed it toward the dwarf army to my right. The whip’s size increased, turning into a red, flaming lasso hundreds of paces wide. It landed around the entire dwarf army, and then Angelus cinched it tight. In the blink of an eye, the flaming lasso sliced through the bodies of the dwarf army as it tightened, cutting every dwarf in half. My friend, the gray-haired dwarf leader, lay on the ground, his torso and legs separated by several feet of bloody grass.

My paladins reacted far quicker than me, for they had already formed blue orbs for their lightning strikes. Before the blue orbs could release their lighting, Angelus launched into the air with a massive swoop of his wings, shot toward me, and grabbed me by my throat in his massive, gloved fist. He lifted me off the ground, carrying me high into the darkened sky.

He was choking the life out of me. My tongue lolled, and my eyes bulged. Out of instinct, I dropped my Ancestral Longsword and reached for the iron fist around my neck to free myself.

He twisted his wrist so I could see Qavalon a half-mile from the battle. Angelus’s dark clouds had not yet reached the city, so the white and gold towers of Sovereign Hall glittered in the morning sun. The temples, shops, homes, parks, and amphitheaters surrounding Sovereign Hall looked so peaceful and innocent from that height.

Qavalon is but a drop in an ocean of worlds, Angelus said, his deep voice almost a whisper, yet tearing through my body as though worming its way into the empty spaces between my atoms. "I will take it from your charred corpse. And then all of these worlds will be mine… Kol Blazingheart."

Then he dropped me above Sovereign Hall, and I fell and fell and—

Chapter two

Anyone see an Abyss around here?

—opened my eyes to darkness.

I was breathing heavily, sweating, and my heart beat like I’d just… well, fallen a hundred paces from the sky. I used to skydive during my younger days, so I knew the feeling.

My Eternal Torch burned beside me on the rocky shoreline next to the Strongriver. The small boat I’d taken for my journey was beached on the shore, and the Strongriver frothed and gurgled just behind it.

What the hell was that dream? It was my most vivid dream since I landed in The Tomb with my friends over a week ago. In fact, it was the only dream I’d had since I arrived. I knew I was dreaming and more of a spectator than a participant, but it had felt as real as everything in The Tomb.

And I had to say; after that dream, I was not looking forward to meeting Angelus again. The scout reavers were bad, but Angelus had single-handedly destroyed our armies with a flick of his sword and a lash of his whip.

And then he had picked me up at the end and called me Kol Blazingheart. What did that mean? Had I viewed Blazingheart’s battle with Angelus when he and the other questers captured him? But that couldn’t be true because they had won, not died.

Or was it a glimpse of the future, where my friends and I finally confronted Angelus?

But he had called me Kol Blazingheart, not my Tomb name, Mace Phoenix.

I took a mushroom cake from my backpack, chewed on it thoughtfully, and washed it down with cool water from a water skin. I went over the dream in my mind, moment by moment, just like I would a memory. Though my dream-self never named my friends, I knew they were there. The red-haired woman barbarian, the gray-haired dwarf, the Krait wizard with the greasy black hair, and of course, the lich. Sonja, Constantine, Stephen, and Vacnul, in that order. Or by their Earthly names, Melony, Tom, Alec, and Isla.

Ultimately, I realized that it was something I wouldn’t soon forget, so I decided to focus on what I had to do now.

I had to find my friends before Angelus did. They had entered the portal to Level Three back in the Culling Temple in Kol Faruum, and then Ragnus, in a final act of vengeance, destroyed the controls to the portal. The portal had winked out of existence before I could jump in after my friends. But not before Ragnus jumped through it to escape the wrath of the deep dwarves he had enslaved.

The deep dwarves had promised to repair the portal controls, but it would take them almost a week. And so now I was taking the dangerous path to Level Three along the Strongriver to the Abyss. I couldn’t wait a week. Maybe Angelus would find them and stick their souls into urns for his trophy closet on Level One. Perhaps he’d kill them all immediately. I didn’t know. But I could feel in my gut that I had to find them and be with them ASAP. Mace, the character whose body I inhabited in this world, felt it too.

And not only that, we both wanted to find Ragnus on Level Three. To bring him to justice for what he did to the deep dwarves and for the murders he’d committed in his quest to wipe out all Krait wizards.

But my trip along the Strongriver had taken far longer than I thought. I had spent almost a day riding the current in the dark cavern, second-guessing my decision to leave before the deep dwarves repaired the portal controls.

When I finally encountered some rapids, I started feeling better about my decision. Durzma Lightbraid, a deep dwarf cleric, had told me as I was leaving that the Strongriver would grow angry just before reaching the Abyss. I wanted to enter the Abyss somewhat fresh before entering Level Three, so I had pulled over to the shore for a quick rest.

That’s where I had the dream.

As I ate my quick meal, I reviewed my Character Sheet on my forearm with the light of my Eternal Torch. It looked like a tabletop RPG sheet tattooed to my forearm in Gothic script. Basic information about my character, Mace Phoenix, and my main stats were listed at the top:

Player Name: Chris Able

Character Name: Mace Phoenix

Positive: Disciplined, Honorable, Merciful

Negative: Stubborn

Rank: Master

Strength: (27) 37

Toughness: 21

Dexterity: 21 (25)

Intelligence: 20

Charisma: 26

Hit Points: 84/84

Magic Points: 104/104

My Hit Points and Magic Points were at full strength. They were my primary gauge on time in The Tomb because they regenerated to their max after one hour. Since I hadn’t taken any damage or used any magic since I began my journey on the Strongriver, they told me nothing about how long I had slept.

I scanned my Skills and Spells beneath my scores:

SKILLS:

Defense: You are experienced in the art of blocking and dodging attacks. +4 to Dexterity.

Precision Strike: You know where to attack an opponent to do maximum damage. +35% chance to hit on all attacks.

Diplomacy: Use your Diplomacy skill when acting in good faith to display proper tact and etiquette while conversing with other characters and creatures. +40% to your persuasion and negotiation checks.

Tactical Vision: You can scan a physical location and determine the best ways to fight a small battle with your available resources. +40% to your Intelligence checks to create an attack plan