Elysium's Multiverse

Chapter 18

Hakim waved his hand at the carnage around them. “I must admit, I was surprised to see you using magic like that. I wasn’t sure if my eyes were playing tricks on me at first, but this is a strange situation we find ourselves in. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised.”

“Well, you saw it right.” Riven nodded in acknowledgment, then cocked his head—and sent Hakim a request to join his party by purely his will to do so. “It indeed was magic.”

The bigger man grinned, and then bowed his head in appreciation yet again. “Thank you for the invitation.”

“Do you have anyone else with you?”

“No. I am alone, or I was until now.”

Riven nodded absent-mindedly. There were three minutes left, and Riven was surprised to find the teenage boy now picking himself up to stumble over to where his sister and mother were. The boy sported a shallow cut where a fist had clipped his forehead, and he shot Riven and Hakim a wary glance. Then he paled when he saw all the death around him, eyes becoming wide while he tried to maintain his balance after being knocked out for a short time. Still, his focus was primarily on his badly beaten mother, and a look of concern was evident as his sister frantically tried to wake their mom. The older woman’s breathing was shallow, and her eyes were swollen; bruises were evident on her neck where she’d been roughly choked, and frankly, it didn’t look good.

Riven sighed and pulled his backpack around, finding what he was looking for only a moment later. Wiping the blood off the two glass bottles containing both the potion he’d received and the one he’d looted off the cultist at the end of the Chalgathi trials, he identified them and smiled at being right with his initial assumption.

The two vials of strawberry-colored fluid were exactly the same, and he gave Hakim a hesitant look before starting over toward the family of three. As he approached with Hakim on his heels, leaving his spider to do her thing, Riven came to a slow stop when the freckled, redheaded son whirled on him with nearly a hiss and held up a hand to stop him from coming any closer. His lips quivered and his green eyes were shedding a steady stream of tears while he put himself between Riven and his family in a stance of defiance.

“Go away,” the young man said with a shaky voice. “Please, just go away.”

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Hakim frowned. Meanwhile, Riven moved over to the right and got a good look at the young woman’s mother. Her breathing was worsening by the moment, and she lay on her back on the grass.

The young woman, the older of the siblings, pushed past her younger brother and gripped Riven’s leather vest with both hands. She was almost a mirror image of her mother but much younger, with green eyes and red hair coming down to her shoulders. She was covered in bruises, but nothing nearly as serious as the other woman. “Can you help her?! You cast magic earlier—do you have anything that can help?”

The woman’s voice was weak, even desperate.

Riven pushed gently past them without saying a word, uncorking the first potion and kneeling down in the grass. The woman’s gasps for air were shallow, and her swollen eyes didn’t allow her to see anything at all—but she gripped her son’s hands tightly while she struggled to cling to life.

Opening her mouth, Riven poured the first potion into the woman’s mouth—letting the berry-scented red liquid trickle in and down her throat. As the last of the potion finished and she managed to take in the liquid more easily, she gasped. The swelling along her neck and eyes began to dwindle, and a rib snapped back into place that Riven hadn’t even noticed had been out of normal orientation moments ago. The color in her face began to return from bruised back to normal, and she opened her eyes to stare up at him—and then her children—with a mixture of emotions.

Her kids immediately began to sob openly as they flung their arms around their mother, chests heaving and tears streaming as they consoled one another after the trauma they’d just undergone.

Riven took the time to stand up and distance himself, giving them some space and feeling good about being able to help. But as he went to walk away, a hand caught him by the sleeve and caused him to turn. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw it was the daughter.

“Thank you,” the young woman shakily stated while wiping a tear away. “Thank you so much.”

Riven nodded and silently shifted his gaze to the son, who still looked rather confused and disoriented from being knocked out. Thus it was the mother that introduced herself first. Her daughter had been whispering into her ear to tell her what was going on even with her eyes being swollen shut for much of it, but she straightened herself and tried to keep her composure. She got up with the help of her children and bravely walked to stand in front of Riven, though Riven could tell that she was nervous by the way she clasped her hands tightly against one another.

“My name is Tanya…” The mother shifted her weight nervously with some effort to stabilize herself and took another look at the gore-strewn battlefield. Then her green eyes fell on two other men far off, wearing the same kind of tattoo as many of those Riven had just killed. The two of them slunk back into the crowd and quickly disappeared from sight when they realized they’d been spotted, but her face turned pale.

It was obvious Tanya had a lot more to say and many questions to ask, but there was one thing above all else that she needed to ask most. “Would it be all right if my children and I came along with you? I promise, we won’t get in the way.”

No one else seemed to want to deal with the blood-soaked Riven after the encounter, not for any reason, and their group remained at five of ten spots filled when the countdown timer finally hit zero. Riven’s minion ended up not counting toward that number. Perhaps people had gotten the wrong impression of what’d happened, or maybe they’d only seen the end and not the beginning. Perhaps they thought him a crazy magic-wielding murderer, but Riven knew he’d done the right thing. The smiles of appreciation he and Hakim got from the three they’d saved were testament enough for him, though the teenage son still gave Riven an occasional wary glance.

Tanya, their mother, was still a little bruised despite having taken the healing potion, though she was in far better shape than she’d been minutes ago. She was in her late forties and had been an elementary school teacher. Julie was the daughter, being twenty-three years old, and had just graduated from a university with a degree in marketing. Tim was Tanya’s son at nineteen years old, which surprised Riven because he thought Tim looked much younger than that. Tim had been attending the same university his older sister had gone to the year prior.

They admitted to their obvious Irish heritage when he asked about it, but Julie managed to roll her eyes and laugh at the question while saying they got that question all the time. They hadn’t actually lived in Ireland and had lived in New York before this abduction off-world had taken place.

Hakim had also opened up in the short amount of time they’d had before the tutorial’s crafting section began. He was from Ghana but had spent years in the States while getting an education and playing football. Then he’d graduated, and at the age of twenty-eight he’d been a financial adviser and a personal trainer before coming here. He was rather easy to like and promised to share more stories of his home right before the time ran out and the world around them turned white.

In a flash of power, they were taken from the sunny field and into a large, well-lit cave with torches at regular intervals along the walls. The cave looked hand-carved, with smooth and polished rock all around the perimeter and numerous skylight holes dug through the stone in the roof. Each of these skylights showed twinkling stars high above them, with occasional sound of crickets somewhere up above and outside their cave. There were also six different stations sporting large tables and various types of equipment at each of them. Farther down the cave was a single iron door, barred shut, and right beside them was a clear pool of water with a series of ordinary wooden cups and flat plates of food.

As for the food? There were grapes, cuts of smoked meat, carrots, and freshly baked loaves of bread. It smelled utterly amazing, and Riven’s stomach immediately rumbled as he stared down upon the food in bewilderment. “We get snacks?”

His Blood Weaver was more enthusiastic. “SNACKKKKSSSSS!”

The demon hopped off his back where she’d parked her head on his right shoulder and scurried over to start devouring a slab of meat, unsettling Tanya and Julie by the way she moved so rapidly as they gave the blood-covered demon an uneasy set of looks.