Kill Dalia and cure the treant of its curse.

  I stared blankly at the words as the meaning of this task sank in. I was being told to kill another human being. Just like that. Like flicking off a light as you went to bed. The casual violence stunned me, even though I had known what the system was like.

  The system, cold and heartless, ruthless and uncaring. Something about the cheerful nature of the little ding that came along with updates to tasks or kills was a stark contrast to how dark and bloody it really was. And I could understand killing monsters. They were unholy creations made by the system for the sole purpose of throwing at us. It was kill or be killed with them.

  But humans?

  We were supposed to be different, made to be different. We were more than animals tearing at eachothers’ throats, than dogs cruelly driven to the edge of savagery the forced to fight one another. And yet… and yet we did so anyway, of our own volition.

  I understood what the system was. It wasn’t a living thing. It only did one thing: train. The system trained us for life, for the hardships and trials we would face out there in the vast and empty expanse of space. We were in a war of extinction, after all. Either we destroyed the Ezgendi or they destroyed us. That called for hard men, and the system was happy to oblige. Not to mention the entire experience in the dungeon was personalized according to our specific lives.

  Now that was a scary thought. What did it say about me that the first of my personalized tasks was to kill another human? Even if it was, in a way, necessary. It was me and the town or her. There were no two ways about it. By the end of today, one of us would lie dead on the altar of the other’s survival.

  Still, I didn’t have to like it.

  “Why?” I asked. My voice rasped like a heavy stone being dragged down the road. Why had she done it? What possible reason could there be to destroy an entire town?

  The woman laughed. And laughed and laughed and laughed. It wasn’t the laugh of a sane person. It was the laugh of the deranged. When she spoke, her voice was the voice of a wooden sign swinging in the winter breeze, it was the cry of the wind howling though an empty canyon, a banshee’s wailing in a dark hollow.

  “Why? WHY? Look around you, boy.” she spat out that last word like it was choking her. “This tiny place is dead already. It hasn’t grown in the last three generations, and the life of the town is waning. When I was a little girl, this whole place was bright and full of wonder. I knew everyone in town by name, and they knew me. Now I only know one or two of them, and no one cares about an old woman like me.”

  That wasn’t true at all. Even I could see it and I had only been in town for a few days. People laughed in the streets, haggling with merchants like old friends. Children danced and sang nursery rhymes and childish songs. But she couldn’t see that. For whatever reason, she had blinded herself to the truth of the town, seeing only what she wanted to.

  “I was the town healer, once,” she continued,“I treated every type of illness under the sun. People came from miles around, from other towns in the region, to see me. Curses and poisons, sickness and plague. I saw all of it. For thirty years this went on, til one day they found her.

  “Meredith was a sweet little girl. It wasn’t her fault she was born with a talent with herbs. She loved it, too. But they saw how normal her methods were compared to mine. No rituals, no blood rites, no hoodoo under an empty moon, no mumbo jumbo whispered over a pot. Just normal leaves and flowers mixed together to work wonders. As if that’s any different.”

  Dalia was babbling. Her voice ranged from a low mutter to a high screech as she spilled whatever dark, bitter thoughts came to her mind. Her eyes bulged, skin stretching, spittle flying, neck flexed to show the strained muscles in her throat and jaw.

  “The people abandoned me for her. Out with the old, in with the new, like a stiffened wineskin, not worth the time taken to burn it. They left me, they left me, they left me, they left me, they left me. All for a little brat who could rub a pair of leaves together and make a nice smell. They left me. Even my own grandson ran off with her. He left me. They left me. Now the moon is my only friend… only friend. It calls to me. My only friend. Calls me to kill, to bleed, to destroy. Yes. Yes, I think I shall. Beautiful moon. Oh what a beautiful, deadly, maddening moon. My only friend. They left me. THEY LEFT ME!”

  Her skin began to glow a soft, pale light and tears of liquid silver began trickling down her face as she ranted, stark raving mad. Her hair transformed into a rippling silver-white, her wrinkles deepened, and her eyes turned a white tinged with silver as well, like her hair. She hunched over even further, turning from an elderly woman into a terrible hag.

  The glow of her skin brightened even further, shining out like a lighthouse on a dark shore, brighter and brighter it glowed until I was forced to cover my face with a hand, then close my eyes, then finally summon my shield in front of me as a last resort to keep my eyes from being seared out of my head. And even with all of those precautions, the light was still almost blinding.

  It reflected off of every glass and metal surface in the room, and there were a surprising amount of those. A knife collection I hadn’t noticed was the worst. Jagged blades meant to rip and tear bounced the terrible light all around the room like a maze of mirrors.

  The hair on my arms and the nape of my neck began to stand on end as energy began to flood the space around her and an odd feeling overtook me. It was a kind of pressure, like being deep underwater. It pressed against me as a physical force, and my knees shook with the weight of it.

  I would later find out this was what the presence of the semi-divine felt like. A dungeon-made god. A being that towered over the whole of a floor, unique and untouchable in its strength.

  Dalia was being touched by a god. Her essence, her very being changing under the light of this strange power, not absolute, but extreme to the point of absurdity. She was being made new.

  Then she exploded.

  I know you might find it a bit odd when I say this, but yes, she did explode. Or, at least, the energy gathered around her did. It overloaded what the air could naturally handle in such a compact fashion.

  The explosion had more energy in it than I had expected. It blew me backwards, causing my vision to temporarily blink away as I smashed against a the ground a dozen yards away, covered in debris.

  The house was gone, as well as the one next to it, reduced to rubble and fragments of charred wood. Wisps of discolored smoke giving off the sickly sweet smell of rotting things. And underneath that was the spice I still couldn’t remember the name of.

  My ears were throbbing in and out of usefulness, and I could only just hear the cries of alarm in the distance as the treant thundered its nightly assault against that offending wall.

  Dalia was standing in the midst of all of this, untouched, looking radiant in the darkness. The silver light had retreated to a slight glimmer around her, speaking of latent danger and an unexpressed cruelty.

  Moonkissed Ritualist(Lvl 9) - Boss

  The true gaze of the moon has brushed this woman, turning her into the incarnation of madness itself. She is no longer fully human, her madness flaying her soul from the inside out in it’s reckless hate for everything it sees. The world twists around her, warping things into twisted images of themselves. Beware the madness of the moon.

  She had gained a level, and she was now a boss. I didn’t know what the difference between a boss and a regular NPC was, though she may not have been classified as an NPC anymore given the description. She might have been more monster than man now.

  Standing there, looking up at the sky and cackling like the madwoman she was, she struck a terrible picture. Hate and madness and violence and pain etched her every line in a horrible mask of pure abomination. There was no hope of saving this woman now. Not after seeing what she had done to herself, what the moon had done to her. All I could do now was get the villagers out of here.

  Even my floor quest recognized this.

  Floor Quest: Delay both the Moonkissed Ritualist and the Moonstruck Treant while the villagers get to safety.

  Do note, this is a solo quest. If you do not complete it on your own, you will be given another.

  Suddenly, my floor quest closed out, replaced by a flashing message with the label Floorwide - Urgent. I opened it, as that was the only thing my system interface would let me do. The message was this:

  Warning! The Moonkissed Ritualist is on the loose. If she is not stopped by the night of the new moon, three nights hence, the Tears of the Night will consume both her and any she has cursed, rendering them incurable and far, far more powerful.

  Great. Just great. Not only did I have to hold back a pair of LEVEL NINES for as long as necessary, which could be anywhere from ten minutes to five hours, but now killing the one I had a feeling was the most dangerous had just gained a timer. Fantastic. I loved it when the system just piled the pressure on.

  Oh, hey! My sarcastic side had decided to come back. Just in time.

  I looked around and found Fisher and Boaz about twenty feet behind me, staring slack-jawed at what once had been Dalia. They had their customary spears each, but they had stopped to pick up shields from the small armory I had noticed a little while ago.

  Crossing the distance between us in a burst of quick steps, I shook both of them. Hard.

  “Snap out of it!” I shouted, not caring if the hag behind me heard what I was saying.

  The two of them blinked, shaking their heads, then stared at me.

  “What is that thing?” Boaz asked, voice trembling.

  “That is what remains of Dalia.” I shook them harder when they opened their mouths to ask me what on earth was going on, “No time for that now. Just get the villagers out of here. Take the back gate. Go. NOW!” I shoved them back.

  Stumbling into a run, they went off to do what I said, casting glances back at me and the thing behind me. I turned to watch her as well.

  There was no way I could kill her. Not now, not at my level. I was stronger than I used to be now that I had gained a couple levels. Well, not exactly stronger, but tougher. I would just have to take the hits, but I could do that. I had done that all my life. It was easy by now.

  This was just that, but taken to an absurd degree. They hit ten times harder, moved five times faster, and weren’t able to be talked down. Sounds about right.

  I moved over and picked my shield up out of the rubble. Surprisingly, it was still in decent shape for all of the beatings it had taken. Sure, the wood was slightly splintered on the surface, and the metal was horribly dented and slightly bowed inwards, but it was still alive. That was all that mattered.

  Setting my feet, I prepared to defend against whatever the Moonkissed Ritualist had in store for me. I could deal with it, what ever it would be.

  Who was I kidding. I was just trying not to panic.

  She turned toward me, hollow eyes burning silver with a fury I could feel on a nearly physical level. That was some serious hate. Which was a problem because, as a ritualist, she could use that emotion to feed her magic, making her spells exponentially more powerful.

  A pool of darkness dripped from her back, moving forward until it took the form of a wispy half-human. Pure white eyes stared out from it, radiating lust for the kill. Those eyes were unsettling. Wrong. Otherworldly. As though some ancient god had plucked a tormented soul straight from the depths of Tartarus.

  And suddenly, I remembered what that spice was I had smelled in her house earlier. It was myrrh, a spice used in ancient burial rites and funerals. There was only one thing such a spice could mean.

  It was an omen of death.