Dark Motives

The pale morning light filtering through the gaps in the awning slowly roused Haruto from his sleep.

The candle beside him had burned out during the night. All that remained was a pool of hardened wax on the desk. Scrolls lay scattered across the surface. Among them were sketches, calculations, and other ideas hastily scribbled down.

He pressed two fingers to his temples. His head was buzzing and throbbing like crazy.

“Damn it! Another sleepless night…”

He looked around briefly. His rented room was barely bigger than a closet.

Aside from the desk and chair, the room contained nothing but a creaky bed and a damp basin. His belongings lay near the door, ready to be thrown into a bag at the first hint of trouble.

Haruto picked up the pages that had fallen to the floor and piled them up as best he could. His eyes fell on a short list written in larger letters than the rest of his scribbles: charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter.

He stared at the words. His right hand instinctively reached for the handle of his knife as he thought back to the Church and Askondal’s lessons.

“I can no longer afford to be unarmed or caught off guard… Not if I want to survive long enough to make it back home,” he thought.

The young man ceased his musings and put on his gray cloak. He slipped his notes into a bag he had mended himself, then checked his small purse one last time.

It didn’t contain much. However, the coins he’d earned during his first few days in this small town called Nerauskei had come from odd jobs: making repairs, adjustments, and discreet improvements. Just enough to remain useful, but not enough to draw attention.

“Tanis… the perfect mask for surviving in this world,” he murmured.

Outside, the sun was weak, and the air was surprisingly mild. You could even hear birds singing. It was as if nothing had ever burned.

The young man shook his head to dispel that fleeting thought and set off toward the market stalls and workshops.

Finding coal would be a simple matter. A blacksmith, a glassblower, a coal merchant, it didn’t matter. Sulfur, on the other hand…

He then remembered a loud voice he’d heard the day he arrived in the central square. And a merchant luring onlookers with his “magic stones.”

Haruto had initially laughed, then noticed the color. Yellowish. And a lingering, foul odor that also reminded him of something.

He finally found the stall toward late morning. The merchant in question, a man named Reuvir, looked every bit the charlatan with his “enchanted” little stones.

In fact, he was holding up one of the yellowish stones in one hand when Haruto approached his stall.

“Magic stones! Come take a look at this magnificent, colorful flame! A true marvel!”

Haruto moved closer, taking his time. He wanted to give the impression that he was just looking, not intending to buy.

Reuvir immediately noticed his eyes and flashed a broad, confident smile.

“Curious, my dear sir?”

“I’m just trying to understand how it works,” Haruto replied.

The merchant chuckled, then reached under his table and pulled out a small stone mortar. He ground up a piece of rock, then placed the powder on a saucer and held a burning ember to it. It ignited immediately, producing a blue flame.

Haruto leaned forward slightly and sniffed the smoke. The smell of rotten eggs assaulted his nostrils. He knew right away what it was.

“Sulfur…” he murmured.

Reuvir blinked, clearly confused.

“Sul… what did you say?”

Haruto placed a hand on the edge of the counter.

“Never mind. I’ll take your entire stock!”

“Wh—what?! All of it?!” stammered the man.

As if to emphasize what he’d just said, Haruto emptied his money pouch onto the table. The clinking of coins made the merchant’s eyes light up. Haruto closed his hand around the coins before they could disappear.

“First, I want to know where these stones are from,” he asked, fixing his gaze on the vendor’s eyes.

There was a moment of silence. Then Reuvir’s greed got the better of his caution.

“An old mine. Abandoned ever since the Church’s patrols started wandering around here…”

He paused… “just before The Darkness…”

“Where?”

“A few hours from here. To the east…”

Haruto nodded. He took the stones and hurriedly stuffed them into his bag.

“That’ll do.”

He walked away quickly before the man realized what he had just revealed.

❖

The road leading to the old mine wasn’t much of one anymore. In some places, the thaw had turned the path into a quagmire. In others, the grass had erased all traces of the path.

The further Haruto went, the fewer buildings. A few stone walls still stood, along with collapsed roofs, but nothing recent. Nothing alive.

“I don’t like this…”

It wasn’t so much the gloomy atmosphere of the place that bothered him. It was the silence, the kind that shouldn’t exist in the middle of spring.

When he finally reached a hill, the morning chill had given way to blinding sunshine.

“There’s no way I’m celebrating until I’ve found the mine’s entrance,” he decided, still panting.

Haruto let out a sigh of relief when he finally located the entrance, which was partially hidden by massive boulders covered in thick brambles. Through the obstacles, Haruto could make out the blackened, damp supports.

“It still seems to be holding… at least for now.”

The beams were old, but the pressure from the ground didn’t seem to have warped them yet.

Pleased with what he saw, Haruto drew his knife and began cutting through the branches. He made a makeshift torch out of an old, greasy rag and a dead branch. The flame caught, faint but steady.

He stepped closer to the opening and took a deep breath. The air coming out of it was cold… and carried a strange smell.

“No doubt about it, this is the place… but there’s something else in the air. A metallic tang… almost like blood.”

Shaking his head to pull himself together, Haruto then plunged into the dark tunnels of the mine. As soon as he took his first steps, a small pebble rolled under his boot, and the sound echoed through the empty tunnel, which took several seconds to fade.

“Damn…” he hissed through gritted teeth, before resuming his walk.

He hadn’t gone ten meters before the moisture in the air seeped through his entire body and made him shiver.

“This doesn’t bode well. I really need to be careful about getting hurt, or I’m dead,” he thought, pulling his cloak tighter around himself.

Haruto continued his exploration for quite a while, during which he came across the remains of tools left behind by the miners. Among them were rotten wooden handles and leather helmets. The metal rivets on one helmet appeared to have been corroded. The same metallic smell he’d noticed earlier hung in the air around them.

“It almost smells like overheated metal…”

Haruto felt a shiver run down his spine. He hesitated for a moment before continuing his search.

He finally found the much-sought-after resource after reaching what seemed like a dead end. Tired and disoriented, the discovery still managed to bring a smile to his face.

“Finally…”

The sulfur before him took the form of small, yellowish, crystalline stones. Using the bone blade of his knife, Haruto managed to pry a few of them loose from the rock face without too much trouble.

He had filled half his bag when the echo of a “plop” coming from the corridor behind him broke the surrounding silence.

Haruto froze in his tracks.

“Who’s there?” he asked nervously.

He stood up abruptly, slung his bag over his shoulder, and turned toward the tunnel, with a torch in his left hand and a knife in the other.

The young man narrowed his eyes and searched the darkness. He couldn’t see a thing. But he could sense something.

That same smell invaded his nostrils with renewed intensity. Then a dark mass shifted in the flickering glow of the torch.

“Shit! What is that…?!”

The shape slowly emerged from the shadows. The flickering light of the torch revealed a smooth and writhing surface.

Haruto unconsciously took a step back. The thing slid toward him. It wasn’t really an animal. More like a mass of gelatin the size of a large dog, undulating slowly. Its charcoal-gray surface was animated by tiny vibrations, like ripples disturbing the surface of a lake.

Haruto held the torch up in front of him. The creature immediately backed away a good meter.

“So, this thing… is afraid of fire, then?”

Haruto felt a surge of confidence. His chances of survival had just increased. Even more so if he could drive the creature out of the way and thus avoid a direct confrontation.

He advanced toward the creature, but it didn’t budge a centimeter. On the contrary, a bulge began to form on its surface and a gelatinous ball was then hurled at him at full speed.

It grazed the knife he was holding. A high-pitched whistle echoed through the tunnel, and the bone in the blade instantly turned black and began to dissolve.

“Acid…!?”

Startled, Haruto dropped the knife, which shattered into countless pieces.

The creature immediately slid toward the fragments. Wherever its body came into contact with the blackened remains, they slowly disappeared into the gelatinous surface.

“Damn it, damn it, and damn it again! ‘Slimes’ aren’t supposed to be this dangerous in games!” Haruto hissed through gritted teeth.

He glanced around the rocky alcove where he stood, frantically searching for anything he could use as a weapon. He grabbed a sulfurous rock and hurled it with all his might at his opponent.

The creature didn’t even flinch when the projectile struck it and embedded itself in its flesh. Just like the knife, it was absorbed before quickly dissolving into the gelatinous mass.

“Wait… the rock…”

Haruto noticed that the “digestion” of the rock was releasing gas that seemed to be bothering the creature.

“So maybe…”

A hole was clearly visible where the sulfur had been “swallowed.”

He quickly grabbed the largest fragments from his bag and threw them one by one at the gelatinous creature.

As the creature absorbed the crystalline pieces, Haruto approached it with his torch. Suddenly, half a dozen protrusions appeared on its surface.

Fearing an imminent attack, Haruto tossed his torch straight at the gelatinous mass.

The effect was instantaneous.

As soon as the flames contacted its surface, the fire engulfed the creature.

“Shit… this smoke… It must be toxic…” he coughed.

Haruto barely had time to finish his sentence before the gelatin exploded like a bomb, creating a searing blast. The explosion violently shook the mine walls and sent Haruto tumbling to the ground.

He finally came to his senses after what felt like an eternity. The air now reeked of rotten eggs.

“Sulfur… and fire…” he gasped.

His body was covered in bruises, and he felt disoriented. A splitting headache was pounding in his skull, and his eardrums were ringing with a shrill, whistling sound.

“That was a close call,” he grumbled as he struggled to his feet.

Then he saw the damage.

“If I’d been any closer to that thing… No, I’d rather not even think about it…”

The stone walls surrounding the creature had melted. The vitrified layer glowed faintly, almost beautiful in the horrid scene.

Haruto picked up his torch, hurriedly gathered his belongings, and set off.

“Mission accomplished. Let’s get the hell out of here…”

❖

A few days had passed since the perilous adventure in the old mine. Haruto was deep in thought, lying on the straw mattress in his room.

Coal was easy to buy, but not saltpeter, also known as potassium nitrate.

“Damn it! There’s no way around it… If I don’t want to waste a ton of time, I’m going to have to put up with wading through crap,” Haruto complained.

Over the next week, he scoured the farms of Nerauskei, scraping away whitish deposits of saltpeter residue.

The work was as grueling as it was disgusting, but the young man remained motivated.

“At least it’s animal waste rather than human waste,” he told himself.

But even that wasn’t enough.

Although the idea repulsed him, Haruto then turned his attention to the outhouses of the city’s taverns and inns. Under the cover of night, illuminated by the stars and celestial debris, he slipped behind these establishments, including the Ivory Apple.

He worked quickly. Most of the time, he was too focused to hear anything but his own breathing. Until one evening, when he spotted a child, a boy who looked about ten years old. Skinny, filthy, and half-naked, he was rummaging through the trash and eating whatever he could find.

“What a rotten world… Shit, that could’ve been me if Aristide and Norea hadn’t taken me in,” Haruto grumbled.

He looked away. After all, there was absolutely nothing he could do for him. And if he started carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, he’d never make any progress.

Haruto shook his head to shake off his doubts and returned to his repulsive task.

After several more forays, he had managed to accumulate a reasonable amount of matter. The carpenter who owned the room he rented even threatened to throw him out because of the stench.

But Haruto didn’t care. He was too close to his goal to give up now. Using bed sheets and wooden buckets, he had built a setup that resembled a large coffee filter. He then poured boiling water over the sediment placed in the center to extract a liquid that reeked of ammonia. So much so that his eyes watered. He repeated this process of boiling and filtering until he obtained a tiny amount of saltpeter crystals.

“It’s not much, but it’ll do,” he thought with satisfaction.

In this world, even the most disgusting things could turn out to be useful.

The next morning, Haruto stuffed his ingredients and a few other items into his bag before setting off for the old mine. Not out of courage, but out of necessity.

He knew his experiments might attract attention. And he had no intention of ending up “purified” by the Church just because someone had seen him.

Halfway to the entrance of the abandoned tunnels, Haruto veered off into the dense forest lining the road. He finally found a small clearing on which the ground was dotted with large boulders the size of a man.

“This place should do,” he said, taking off his backpack.

Haruto first took out the components, then a small metal cylinder, crudely forged according to his specifications. It had a tiny hole punched in the base. For now, it was just a simple test device—a prelude to something far more dangerous.

The young man then threaded a small string through the hole. He measured, mixed, packed, and sealed the ingredients inside the tube with a piece of cloth. Finally, he placed it right up against a boulder, pointing it toward the sky.

“Well… it’s show time,” Haruto said nervously, his forehead covered in sweat.

He lit the fuse and dashed off like a rabbit to hide behind a massive boulder.

Haruto waited for what seemed like an eternity, counting every second, but nothing happened. Complete silence. Except for the faint rustling of the leaves.

Risking a glance, he immediately noticed that the string had indeed burned all the way down to the metal tube.

“No… don’t tell me…”

He took three steps forward before coming to a halt.

“What if the powder ignites with a delay…”

He waited about ten more minutes. When he finally opened the tube, the powder had simply settled at the bottom.

“Of course…”

Haruto emptied the tube and started over—again and again. He persisted for hours on end. Most of the time, the results were unsatisfactory, but when he got lucky, he was rewarded with smoke or even a faint bang.

Until, finally, something worked properly. The sound was crisp and promising, signs of a clean burn.

He smiled briefly.

“I’m almost there.”

In that instant, a branch snapped in the underbrush. Haruto stiffened. Even the birds fell silent. He let out a curse before scanning the area for the intruder.

“Who’s there?”

A small figure appeared among the trees for a split second. Then nothing.

Haruto felt the blood drain from his face.

“Did… did that have to happen now?” he stammered, beginning to panic.

He quickly gathered everything up, including the still-armed device, and immediately set off for Nerauskei.

❖

Back in town, Haruto paced back and forth in his room, clearly agitated.

“Who on earth would be interested in me?”

Questions like this kept racing through the young man’s mind. Until he finally decided that it would be crucial for his survival to flee the city as quickly as possible.

“Someone’s bound to talk eventually,” he told himself.

So, he gathered his belongings, including his sketches and notes, paid the old carpenter, and headed south.

“I hope Tunaust will do the trick…”

Haruto had heard many rumors about this great city. Its central crossroad was so popular that a constant stream of merchants, mercenaries, and others passed through it. In short, it was the ideal place to take refuge without attracting attention.

Haruto was walking at a brisk pace when he spotted a landmark looming on the horizon. It was the marker indicating the start of the road leading to the mine.

Suddenly, a group of four men emerged from behind a nearby building and surrounded him. A short man stepped toward Haruto.

“What do we have here?”

“Someone who wants to continue on his way without any trouble,” he replied.

Haruto studied his interlocutor closely: disheveled hair, a few days’ stubble, and clothes reeking of grime and sweat.

“Oh sure, that’s right… Tanis…” retorted the leader of the group with a sneer.

“How do you know my name? Sir…”

“Skotto,” the man added.

He then turned his head toward the building behind which he and his men had been waiting and whistled loudly.

After a few seconds, a young boy who looked rather ill staggered toward them.

Haruto recognized him immediately: the kid from the alley, the one rummaging through the trash.

“What a bunch of scumbags,” he thought, clenching his fists.

The boy stopped obsequiously in front of Skotto, who placed his hands on each of the boy’s frail shoulders, as if he were about to strangle him.

“This little punk swore to me he saw you hanging around the outhouses and even doing magic in the forest. Do you know what that means?”

“And what about you, Skotto? Do you think it’s wise to pick a fight with a mage?” Haruto retorted.

The man said nothing, but clenched his teeth and shot Haruto a venomous glare.

“Do you take me for a fool? It’s four against one,” Skotto growled, spitting on the ground.

He stepped toward Haruto until he was less than a meter away, then drew and pointed his blade at him.

“And most importantly,” Skotto continued, “he told me you showed up just a few days after that strange woman.”

Haruto’s blood ran cold.

“A strange woman? What are you talking about?”

Skotto’s smile twisted.

“That bitch! She stole something from me! Some weird, priceless object… from the ruins of that damned destroyed village. No way I am letting her get away with it,” he hissed angrily.

“A destroyed village? Could it be Pauweik? What on earth could that weird thing be? And who is this mysterious woman?” Haruto wondered.

The knife pointed at him paralyzed Haruto, but he forced himself to remain stoic before his opponent.

“You’re talking about Pauweik, aren’t you? I… I also found a unique object there. Would you like to see it?” Haruto asked, quickly taking off his backpack.

This surprised Skotto, who took a few steps back before regaining his composure.

“Uh, yeah… No! Watch it, kid! And don’t try to pull a fast one on me,” he snapped.

Haruto frantically rummaged through his belongings, searching for his metal tube. He was delighted to find it in the same condition as before.

“So, what is the damn thing?”

“Yeah, just a sec…”

Haruto trimmed the string before lighting it with flint. He quickly grabbed the tube and casually tossed it toward Skotto.

“There you go. What do you think?”

Skotto caught the object and turned it between his fingers, intrigued. And, by sheer bad luck, he brought the opening up to his face.

The powder exploded with a deafening bang that startled even the gangster’s henchmen. The cloth plug was blown away first, followed by a shower of burning powder.

Skotto fell backward and began screaming in agony. He rolled on the ground, one eye gouged out and his face torn to shreds.

“Aaahhhh! You filthy… filthy son of a bitch! Aaarghh!”

Seeing their leader in such agony, the thugs took a step back... then two. And then they fled.

“Witchcraft!” shouted one of them.

Haruto took advantage of the sudden chaos to grab the still-smoking metal tube from the ground before running with all his might to the road.

Pauweik. A female mercenary and a strange object. It wasn’t a clear lead, but for now, it was all he had.