The Gamer Chapter 1638 – The Upper Hive (Patreon)

“Why are you even here?” John wanted to know. “I know I am benefitting from the fact that you are right now, but the question remains. I can’t imagine Max invited you.”

“You’re too smart to ask that question.”

“You’re someone’s plus one aren’t you?” the Gamer asked drily. “Your way to weasel your way into this celebration was to pull in a few favours with somebody who you could attach yourself to without anyone asking questions.”

“And thus I am here,” Suel confirmed, tipping an imaginary hat. They made their way out through a backdoor. Servants were looking at them as they passed, too busy to stop and gawk, but certainly not busy enough to make their shared walk the talk of the town. “You’re thinking too highly of me if you think they’ll gossip about us,” Suel stated.

“You best leave my head right now.”

“Are you threatening me, young man?”

“No, I am warning you that my first fiancée does not like male roommates.”

Suel cackled. “Ah, young love. Sadly, I cannot say it ever struck me. I was always too busy comprehending the secrets of the blood and curses.”

“The Japanese ones?”

“A very fascinating subject, isn’t it? The Abyss is in a steady state of decay and renewal. New magics are discovered and then lost as the one individual who pushed a field forward perishes and takes all their innate knowledge with them. Magic overall advances, until someone powerful decides that a particular school of magic is not fit for their realm. We have no idea how the Japanese actually managed to curse bloodlines. In a thousand years, I imagine, fusing with elementals may be totally forgotten. As was recently demonstrated, we struggled to maintain even what levels of arcane magic were bestowed to us in the age of the first empire.”

“You’re talking too much,” John observed calmly. He knew that kind of palavering. Suel was trying to distract him from something or trying to pull his attention towards something specific by acting like he was distracting from something or trying to distract him from something by… that train of thought went a long, long way. It was distractions all the way down. “Did you discover something about curses or not?”

“Does my face not give it away?” Suel showed his nicest, vampiric grin.

“You could have just said, ‘I’m not saying,’” John groaned.

They descended a flight of stairs. A regular flight of stairs, worked into the side of the top plateau. There was no railing and the drop led four stories down straight onto a solid stone roof. It was the kind of architecture that no one in the modern day would approve of. Sometimes John wondered if people in the past had just been built with steadier feet or a much diminished fear of death. Probably, both was the case. Steadier feet from the constant threats and a lesser fear of death from seeing it so often.

“What makes you say that they won’t talk about seeing us walk together?” John kept his eyes on the surrounding streets. Like most Abyssal cities, the activity around him was of moderate density, judging by the perspective of a mundane. Population density was low, especially in these upper spires. “Are you really that unimportant?”

“To the average person.” Suel suddenly grabbed a passerby by the shoulder. The young, petite woman turned, clearly startled. “Do you know who I am?”

“N-no?” she answered.

“He-he, good. On your way.” Suel released her and, like any sane person, she quickly walked away. Her steps stopped for a moment when she spotted John behind the creepy, red-eyed noble, but she moved on anyhow. “You see now?”

“I suppose your infamy is mostly confined to the elite circles.”

“Indeed.” Suel made a little bow towards a nearby pathway. “Shall we?”

“You’re the guide,” John stated. “You first.”

“If you insist, coward.”

Suel stumbled when a wave of John’s ire washed over him. That was as much of a warning as John dared to put on in this public place. The grin the bothersome ruler of the Crimean province shot him made clear he had learned nothing.

“Perhaps if you were aiming for other titles, you shouldn’t fight from the back,” he suggested.

“Lead,” John growled.

Suel did. They stepped off one of the medium-sized roads into a half-tunnel. Arches and house walls formed the confines of the corridor of stone and ancient concrete. Various architectural styles meshed with each other, often working well, at other times clashing heavily. Where the difference was at its starkest, the buildings had been erected recently. The utilitarian designs of the modern world technically could trace their lineage back to the Roman columns, the civilization that had created one being a far-off descendant of the other. Without the connective tissue to prove that much, however, the claim that they were related was as absurd as to suggest humans shared a common ancestor with rats.

It was true, of course. Everyone in the modern world accepted evolution as the reasonable explanation. It was nice and blunt in its logic and yet John could hardly blame anyone with a lesser girth of evidence for it to raise an eyebrow at the claim that they had all been fish at some point.

“What are you trying to show me right now?” John asked, as they walked through a particularly ugly segment of the city.

“Guess.”

John swallowed his passive annoyance and let his eyes drift over the virgin surfaces of recently woven stone. Other walls around the city were weathered by rain, work incidents, and the foolish boredom of young men and couples alike.

“These are the scars of the city,” he presented his theory. “The wounds from the Five Days War.”

Suel applauded. “Bravo, excellent deductive ability.”

“I have little need to be reminded of the realities of war, Lord of Pontis,” John stated. “I’m here to plan a Bachelor’s night, not to regale war stories.”

“No, you’re here to learn more things about a city,” Suel chirped with arrogant certainty. “Why would you care about this little ki-“

The vampiric man stopped abruptly when John slammed him against the wall. Fire enveloped the Gamer’s hand, manifesting in dragon claws that could have sliced the fabric of Suel’s suit as easily as the skin, muscle, and even bone underneath.

“What do you think that pro-“

Suel was stopped in that second sentence as well. Ripping him off the wall, John threw him to the ground. Standing above him, the Gamer first placed a foot on the man’s chest, then extended his left hand. Inkaryl manifested, answering the call of the body that was too weak to wield it. John loosened his grip before gravity could pull him down with the mace.

The Sceptre of the Undeclared King slammed, six points, into the pavement. The blades sunk down to the first jagged corner into the stone, then stopped. By physics alone, the super-heavy weapon would have continued to crack through the layers of this city like a ball of incandescent tungsten going through layers of silk. By the grace of magic, it stopped there, right next to Suel’s head.

“Know your boundaries, Lord of Pontis,” the President of Fusion warned. “I can hide your death for long enough that my friend will have a pleasant wedding.”

John wasn’t sure himself if he was being genuine or not. He tried not to think about it. If he was at least somewhat certain he could go through the act, it added more weight to the threat.

Suel was several shades pastier than usual and just nodded a few times. John removed his foot. Inkaryl disappeared, called back to the body that usually made use of it.

The next half hour was pleasantly quiet. Suel just went ahead and guided the Gamer to the ‘party district’ of the city’s western half. In that, he was admittedly helpful. Even the upper crust of Abyssal Prague was ten metres thick at the thinnest points. While John’s erudite mind had an easy time constructing a map of the area as he advanced, finding all of the angled corridors and staircases would have been an issue.

This wasn’t helped by the fact that everything around was slightly off. There was barely a level surface or 90 degree angle. Houses leaned this way or another and the bridges that connected them above the narrowing and broadening walkways had been shaped with these irregular dimensions in mind. At one point, they had to follow a whole spiral of ascending staircases to reach a house that had been built on top of an apartment block, containing a (currently closed) highly expensive bar.

“Why is so much of this city crooked?” John asked as they headed back down the narrow stairs.

“There was the earthquake of 901, the Hussite rebellion and recently the Five Days War,” Suel reported. The vampiric guide was back to his upbeat, haughty tone. He kept his choice of words agreeable at least. “Anything you would love to know first?”

“Tell me about it in order,” John said.

“In 901, a Natural Barrier that had been somehow overlooked melded with Abyssal Prague and unleashed on the city a torrent of worm creatures, led by a terrestrial dragon. The beast was slain within the hour, but not before it unleashed a series of tremors that, combined with the worms burrowing about for several more years, caused the entire city to tilt by about 0,5 degrees.”

John could already hear the groans of every architect that had needed to build on this city after that. Since the foundation of the city was a solid stone disk, everything that had come before was tilted with it and everything that was built level after now was off relative to it.

“The Hussite rebellion was quite the unusual event, it has to be said. It was one of the few times Christianity caused a ruckus on this side of the divide. The religion had caught on with a great number of the leadership, who then proceeded to defenestrate their opposition. The leader was one Franz von Habsburg, Marquise of Czechia. As you may imagine, you need much higher towers and a bigger impact force to kill an Abyssal by throwing them out the window – unless you’re a gravity mage.” Suel laughed and shook his head. “A series of particularly violent impacts had the city tilt 1,2 degrees another way. This was over 600 years later.”

John now heard the renewed groaning of the architects as another 600 years of architecture now tilted another other way.

“Then, during the Five Days War, some of the communist subverters launched a last ditch effort to destroy as much of the infrastructure of the city as possible. They blew up several of the foundational pillars, causing a few sectors of the city to slump. Nothing catastrophic happened and the structural integrity of the superstructure was stabilized, but a few of the districts are still a little lower than they’re supposed to be.”

John scanned the environment for any cracks. There were some, but none so large that he could argue they were worrisome. Any argument he would have made that it was unwise to make a structure this enormous out of a material as rigid as stone of all things were undone by magic. The fact that the city was still standing, despite those incidents, after more than a millennium spoke for itself. Much like the Dutch with their hydro-engineering, the Czech seemed to have figured out how to work with the capital city and the surrounding mountains.

“Necessity is the mother of invention,” John suggested.

“Indeed.”

The guided tour continued for a little while longer. Suel showed John bars that couldn’t have had more than a few customers a week, just because of where they were located and how much competition they had in the area. Just that revelation already made this tour invaluable. What John had managed to pick out via internet searches had been the big places that everyone knew. Little side shops like this were run by the kind of people that did not want to advertise. People that did bartending as a hobby.

There were more of them than John would have guessed.

The people in the streets were, mostly, nicely dressed ladies and gentlemen, with the occasional eccentric or daytime drunkard mixed in there. Just the average… John wasn’t sure if this was east or west Europe. The average central European experience.

“And with the boring part of the tour done…” Suel suddenly turned a sharp corner. John took three swift steps to catch up, entering the kind of alleyway that had once been fenced off by a narrow gate. Now, the long alleyway was used for trash cans and trash cans alone – except there was a tiny staircase tucked away near the end of it, ending in a highly suspicious door of welded steel. “…down to the interesting bit!”

John followed Suel down the stairs. “It's just open?” the Gamer asked, when Suel pulled at the door handle.

“This is a maintenance door,” the Lord of Pontis answered and pointed at a symbol etched into the stone above. It looked somewhat like a manhole. “Just try to find these. Doors marked with it are always open. No one assumes that you’d want to go into this area without a good reason.” He flashed John a mischievous smile. “Of course, there’ve been a few gears greased to make sure the mentality stays that way. Now, come along, let me show you the dying underbelly of Prague!”

What an ominous introduction.