Ruthless: Path of Conquest

The words appeared to confirm that Moishe and his remaining companion’s ordeal was over.

[Congratulations! You have cleared Dungeon: Valley of the Shadow of Death!]

[Assassin leveled up!]

It kind of sucks that he didn’t even get to be the first one to clear it, James thought. All he got was a lousy level…

“I’m so sorry you had to go through that, man,” James said.

“Thanks, James,” Moishe said. His voice was hollow.

“And I’ll make sure no one else does,” James murmured.

Below them, James saw the past Moishe and his companion, both covered in horrendous burns, chug a Health Potion each and continue running away from the church that had apparently been the entrance to the Dungeon.

James marked the church’s appearance in his mind. He wasn’t certain if Dungeons could be destroyed—at least, he wasn’t sure about destroying Dungeons that did not seem to have a Dungeon Core—but James badly wanted to see this place destroyed.

After he felt certain he had memorized the location, he watched past Moishe as the setting changed. Moishe’s companion was barely still walking, and Moishe himself clearly lacked the strength to carry his ally. The two figures leaned on each other, but it was obvious to James’s eyes that the other man was fading rapidly.

The two men were still following James’s Skin Balloon, which had waited for them to emerge from the church Dungeon, with no thought of doing something else or going anywhere else. This was the main problem with James’s self-created monsters, he noted. Most of them had no real capacity to do anything other than perform a single task that James had given them—they exercised no judgment. It took extra time and energy to create a monster with more powers.

If the Skin Balloon had been capable of thinking critically about its mission—if it had conveyed to James that the person it was supposed to guide had been stuck in a Dungeon—he thought he might have done something about it.

James didn’t know if there was anything he could have done, but he was still angry at everyone and everything that had conspired to trap one of his people and burn him to near death.

The dream followed past Moishe for a long way. It was still guided by present Moishe’s intentions, James guessed, but the Assassin was not exactly focused at the moment. Lost in his memories, he was simply watching them play out rather than guiding the vision to the most useful moments.

James didn’t feel any pressing need to interrupt. In the world of the mind, he knew that events could move much more quickly than they did in real life. He was willing to wait for Moishe’s vision to catch up to the present.

After what felt like around five miles from the Dungeon, Moishe’s companion collapsed. James could tell it would happen in advance. The other man had been leaning increasingly heavily on Moishe over the last stretch of distance.

And he was aware Moishe had arrived at the Fisher Kingdom alone.

So he had known the ending of the other’s story well in advance.

“I’ll come back for you,” past Moishe promised the dying man, kneeling and clutching his hand tightly. “I’ll—I’ll send someone, I—”

“Go,” said the man on the ground. The words came out in a pained whisper, but the man tried to twist his horribly burnt mouth into a semblance of a smile.

The two men squeezed each other’s hands, and then Moishe moved on with renewed energy.

James saw night fall, but the crescent moon found Moishe still scrambling toward the Fisher Kingdom, following the monster in the sky that still guided him.

The sun rose again, and he was still moving forward, albeit visibly weakened.

At no point did Moishe stop.

He showed endurance and grit befitting a soldier.

Finally, standing in a tangled wood, past Moishe clearly sensed monsters all around him, surrounding his position from behind some trees.

“Fuck! Shit…”

The Assassin drew his daggers from within his bag and looked from side to side. His strength was clearly completely gone by this point, but his eyes remained defiant. He was ready to make his last stand against this sick, brutal, new world.

Then a familiar, two-headed wolf poked both her heads through the trees.

“Human, you were from James’s Orientation,” she murmured, a question in her tone.

“Oh, thank God…” past Moishe muttered.

He slumped to his knees and then fell forward, and the world turned dark.

James, Hester, and Moishe were left floating in darkness together.

Moishe seemed to return to life with the end of the show.

“Thank you for coming to visit,” he said. “I hope you took something useful from that.”

James nodded. “And I’ll try to wake you up, too.”

“Try to—I know it’s probably not reasonable to think he’s still alive, but could you please try to recover the guy I left behind?” Moishe asked. “Even if he’s dead—I mean, I guess I assume he’s dead.” He swallowed. “But if he is dead, he deserves a proper burial, not to be picked over by fucking wild animals. His name is—was Hercule. Tough bastard. If anyone besides me or you could keep on clinging to life out of sheer spite—” He just shook his head and gave a bittersweet smile.

“I will,” James said. “As soon as I leave your bedside.”

“There’s one more thing, James,” Moishe said. “One more interaction I witnessed involving the religious leader Cyrus.” His voice was full of scorn. “I want to show you.”

A part of James wanted to tell Moishe not to spend any more mental energy on the Valley of the Shadow of Death. James felt confident he could restore Moishe to full strength with his Blessing, and he doubted that any additional memories of the dead Cyrus would add value to the extended flashback vision that James had witnessed.

But he held his tongue and simply nodded.

I can’t afford to turn my nose up at any intelligence from a trustworthy source, he thought.

James still had the feeling that he wasn’t quite done dealing with Cyrus and the problems that he represented.

The void around the dreamers dissolved into a visual of the interior of the Valley of the Shadow of Death once again.

It was the sunset hour there, that magical time when the warmth of the day begins to subside as the landscape is bathed in a golden-orange light.

Past Moishe was nowhere to be seen, until present Moishe pointed out where he lay, camouflaged, on the ground.

He was just outside the perimeter within which the angel would have noticed him and begun to “test” him.

On the other side of that perimeter, Cyrus sat around a fire with a group of other men, most of whom James did not recognize. He did note that one of the men around Cyrus had been the leader of another group that had walked into the Dungeon while Moishe was there. Christopher Smith was also part of the group.

“So, where are you going?” one man was asking Cyrus.

“The angel wanted me to march East,” Cyrus said. “I’m to seek out a powerful leader. The angel gave me a crown to present to a possible Holy King.”

“That’s interesting,” said a third man. “I’m supposed to take my group straight to the Holy Land.”

“Same here,” said a fourth man, clearly excited. “It feels like a great new chapter is being written…”

“I’m going West,” said the first man, frowning. He sounded slightly aggravated by that direction. “A part of me was tempted to ask if that was a mistake. Back toward Orlando? The same way we came?”

“The Lord doesn’t make mistakes,” snapped Smith.

“What my friend means to say,” added Cyrus before the exchange could become heated, “is that we should trust the angel. It is an instrument of God. We must not forget what we have all already experienced. Fire that only burned the wicked and not the righteous. A true angel floating unsupported above the earth for all the time we’ve been here.” He gestured toward the fiery angel that still stood above the canyon. “We’ve entered into a new age of miracles. It isn’t a time to question divine guidance.”

Cyrus’s voice rang with pious patience, but there was also a zealous certainty to it that James still found creepy. The Prophet pretended to be more tolerant and mild-mannered than his henchman, but he was no less fanatical for the pretense.

The vision faded to black once more.

“I see,” James muttered, immediately grasping what Moishe had wanted to show him. “So they’ll be all over, now.”

Moishe nodded. “It could be a big problem for you, I’m guessing.”

“We already know what it’s like dealing with a Prophet,” James said darkly.

“Yeah. Good luck, man.” Moishe’s voice was soft and sad. It sounded like a farewell.

“Don’t say that like I’m not going to see you,” James said firmly. “You’re going to wake up. You won’t be stuck here.”

“Since you’re saying it, I believe it,” Moishe replied in a sincere tone. “Don’t leave it too long, if you can help it, please. Or I might forget about this whole conversation and go back to how things were…”

James took Hester and left Moishe’s dream without another word or any hesitation. He wanted to be back in the real world, where his powers worked properly and predictably.

That was how he would revive Moishe.

When his eyes opened, the first thing he did was push himself up from his slumped position to his feet. Then he moved toward the bed where Moishe lay.

The angle of the candlelight had changed slightly, the only apparent sign of the time that had passed. James guessed it had been around an hour, though in the dream world, it had felt like days.

He looked down at his ally, who remained unconscious and hideously burned—but changed just slightly from how he had been before the dream, unless James remembered incorrectly.

In the time that James had Dreamwalked with him and Hester, Moishe had shifted his expression to a slight smile. He looked almost carefree, as if he had somehow forgotten everything he had been through over the last few months.

A part of James almost wanted to just let him sleep. Almost.

“Are you sure you’ll be able to wake him, sir?” Hester asked, her voice trembling slightly.

It struck James that for nearly every interaction James had experienced with Moishe—every single one except for when James freed the prisoners of the Moloch cult, when he and Moishe first met—Hester had been present.

For all James knew, Moishe might be one of her favorite people—or at the least one of her favorite characters in his story.

“Not completely certain,” James said, “but as sure as I can ever be about something like this before I actually do it. The situation is very similar to what happened after the Haunted Forest battle. Just like those people, Moishe’s condition is stable, but he’s somehow stuck in a coma. It’s as close to apples to apples as I can imagine. Otherwise I wouldn’t have spoken so confidently about seeing him in the real world soon.”

“Yeah, but… that was a Wraith’s work. It was a semi-divine entity that did this.”

James didn’t want to express his private view, very disrespectful even in his own eyes, that gods and angels were basically just overgrown monsters on a power trip anyway. So he remained diplomatically silent.

Instead of verbalizing a response to Hester, he considered the wording to use in blessing Moishe.

After a few seconds of contemplation, he knew what he wanted to say to try to fix Moishe’s condition. He placed his hands on Moishe’s chest, and he began to speak the Blessing of the Fisher King into reality.

“Moishe Rose, you were one of the earliest allies of the Fisher King. As his vitality flows strongly, may similar vitality flow through you. As he heals, may you likewise heal. As he resists the power of enemy gods and their servants, may you resist…”