A Jaded Life

The more things change, the more they stay the same. At least that held true for trudging through the muck and mud of the swamp their group was exploring. The world had changed, their bodies had changed, everything had changed and yet, exploring a muddy swamp was just as annoying as it had been some forty-odd years before, when Mrs Wu had been trained to navigate terrain like this. Sure, some things were different, her body, for example, was a lot more capable, despite the many years that had passed since her youth but, as if to make up for that, the beasts inhabiting the swamp were more dangerous now than they had been back then. All in all, the tension and danger remained the same but, more importantly, the mud was just as annoying as it always had been, trying to drag people into it, to make them stumble and fall, so they would get lost in the mud and the muck until they literally became one with the swamp. That part, too, was just the same. And, just as she had back then, she hated it now with the passion of a thousand burning suns, to the point that she was sending the occasional prayer to the Golden Crows to descend and scorch the entire area. Alas, no Golden Crow was descending and there was no miraculous drying of the swamp.

To make matters worse, or at least to make her mood worse, Kevin seemed to enjoy the mud and the muck. Well, at the very least, he was enjoying the humidity and the sheer ubiquity of water in the environment, allowing him to wield his magic with incredible ease. There were moments during which she wondered what would happen if the boy ever got to the ocean, would he just jump into the water, maybe grow a set of flippers, and never be seen again? Drifted off as sea foam, or something along those lines?

But no, thanks to his own inquisitive nature, the boy had sprouted some leafy appendages, making him eerily similar to some of the native swamp creatures, the Drowned, while also indicating that his recent racial change had given him an additional affinity for nature, not something you would find at the surface of the ocean. However, there was a lot of greenery at the bottom of the ocean, so maybe he actually would be lost to the sea, as the old saying went. Only, back then, the desire for adventure on the high seas had been what had taken the young people, now, it might be a lot more literal.

Shaking her head, Wu Chenhua focused her mind back on her current task, to explore a path through the swamp and find the area where a bunch of large crocodiles were breeding. Their quest, acquired by Kevin from some unknown source, was to decimate the crocodiles by killing two dozen of them while gathering a dozen of their eggs, undamaged if at all possible.

A part of her mind was incredibly dissatisfied with her ignorance about these strange concepts from the system. She knew about computer games and considered them an amusing pastime but for games, there was always a designer, a man behind the curtain so to speak, who set the tasks and gave the narration, making them little more than a story delivered with a different medium. Fundamentally, there was little difference between a story told around a campfire, as humans had done for millennia, and a story told through the screen of a computer, in both cases, it was a tale coming from another mind. In that context, some strange side-quests might make sense, allowing the designer to present reasons for the audience to engage with their story. But now, with quests being a part of the real world, there was no designer, nobody had decided that they, as a group, needed to engage with the swamp, or was there?

It was an incredibly discombobulating idea, to question whether their reality remained as free and open as it had been before the change, where the only shackles came from the laws of nature, like gravity holding everyone down, and the far less rigorous laws of society. But the laws of the system? On some level, they were similar to the laws of nature, the system simply was, just like nature simply was. There was no arguing with gravity, you could not try to bribe the laws of motion, you had to accept them, study them and search for ways to get around them. In that regard, the laws of nature and the laws of society were quite similar, they could be circumvented, if one used the right approach. But the laws of the system, the rules it operated under, were both more and less constraining. Or maybe they simply didn’t know enough about the system to bend its laws and rules, to circumvent its operation. However, given just how deeply the system seemed to be embedded in this new and changed reality, maybe it wasn’t a good idea to try bending its laws. How knew what might bend with them?

The rules of nature had already become uncertain enough, what with people being able to make it rain, only that it was now a lot more literal than it had been before the change. A single youth, granted, a single youth with some fairly strange and esoteric knowledge and abilities, could somehow conjure up enough water to supply a village or, if he so desired, to make it rain for a day, wherever he wanted. Drought? Deserts? A thing of the past, if somebody like Kevin was around, at least once he got some additional power under his belt. Who knew what Samantha, the woman who had originally taught Kevin how to wield his magic, could do now? Given her predilections, that thought was quite scary, Samantha had been a wonderful and attentive student but it took a special kind of person to learn what Mrs Wu had been teaching her back then. Now, with the world changed as it had, was that a good thing or a bad thing? She just didn’t know.

The comparatively relaxing part of their trip ended suddenly and violently. There was just about half a second between the moment Mrs Wu noticed the lurking threat and the lurking threat stopped lurking and became an active threat that tried to get its teeth into her limbs. One of the crocodiles had managed to make like a stump and blend in with the environment to the point that Mrs Wu, even with her impressive abilities as a scout and tracker, hadn’t noticed its presence until it was almost too late.

She managed to step back and avoid the snapping jaws but that only bought her a few moments of reprieve as the thing was still rushing towards her only that now her footing was also compromised thanks to the thick mud. Instead of trying to step aside, an action impossible thanks to the muck, she leaned, bringing her centre of mass out of the charging crocodile’s way while crossing her arms in an attempt to take some of the punishment. It would her, sure, likely even break her arms, but comparing broken arms and getting brutally tossed aside to getting your torso shattered while your body was crushed under a few hundred kilos of crocodile? Well, the choice was a simple one.

Sadly, the choice being simple didn’t stop it from being incredibly painful and only thanks to extensive training, Mrs Wu managed to stay awake for the rest of the fight. Not that the fight was a terribly long one, not with the element of surprise gone. Just after the crocodile pushed her aside, Wendy used her staff to buttress her shield, giving it enough stability to stop the heavy crocodile in its tracks. The thing looked quite surprised when it crashed into the suddenly immovable object, the impact stunning it long enough to let Kevin work his magic and conjure up some roots from the soggy soil and use them to tie down the croc’s limbs. Once it was tied down, there was relatively little it could do but try to break free, a task that gave John and Oliver ample opportunity to get their weapons into the beast’s body.

As bright, red blood added to the moisture already in the soil, the struggles of the crocodile quickly lessened and by the time the muck was more red than brown, they stopped entirely. That, in turn, allowed Oliver, their medic, to start taking care of Mrs Wu. To her pleasant surprise, her arms weren’t broken, only badly bruised but a bruise was a lot easier for Oliver to treat than broken bones were. It only took a bandage with some strange goop smeared on it and some fifteen minutes to work for her to be as good as new, with only her memories acting as a lesson to keep her out of future trouble.

Magic, or alchemy in this case, could be amazing but she still wasn’t sure if she enjoyed this new, strange world. If only her husband could be with her and guard her back. But if wishes were fishes and all that. For now, they had more crocodiles to hunt.