I Found a Door to the Elven Realm

Chapter 206: New Clone Path - Archer

"So I’m the second one," the clone said again this time slower then waited because Eren still hadn’t said anything.

Eren just looked at him.

He’d been thinking of a careful speech for two days, six versions of it, the kind of speech you give to a confused guy who just woke up not knowing he’s a copy. And the guy standing on the grass in front of him already knew everything. The skill had handed him the whole memory this time, all the way down to a dead body sinking into a lake on Day 38. The speech was useless now.

"Yeah," Eren managed. "You’re the second one."

The clone had come out of the air with nothing on him, which made sense because the Clone skill only built a body. A body was meat and bones and a working pair of lungs and the system didn’t care whether that body had pants. The first copy had woken up the same way a month ago, lying face-down in the dirt wearing only shorts, and that was just because he’d been wearing shorts when the original Eren walked into the bathroom that night. This one had nothing because Eren had nothing on him when he cast the skill that morning, beyond his own clothes that the system clearly wasn’t going to copy too.

The body was the old one. Thin shoulders, soft around the middle, the crooked nose from the glass door incident when he was fourteen, a full head shorter than Eren stood now. Looking at it too long was uncomfortable in a way Eren couldn’t even name, so he stopped looking and dragged the duffel out from the roots of the big tree.

"Put these on," he said and tossed over the folded bundle. "I packed your old size. Figured you’d come out looking like a before photo."

The clone caught it one-handed and dressed in silence. The shirt hung loose on him. The pants needed the belt cinched two extra holes. He didn’t make any of the jokes that Eren’s brain kept queueing up because he was, apparently, the one of the two of them with some dignity left this morning.

"Thirty-eight days last time," the clone said when he was dressed. "I’d put money on something close to that. Maybe a little more now that you actually leveled the skill up."

"I don’t have a number."

"I know you don’t." The clone scratched the back of his neck. "I just said I’d put money on it. I don’t have any money either. Anyway. What’s the plan?"

God, I’m exhausting.

Eren wasn’t going to test anything in the deep forest. A Level 1 anything died in under a minute out there and he hadn’t burned a thousand mana to watch a copy of himself get eaten by something with too many legs in the first hour. And he definitely wasn’t going near the ruins where a dragon the size of a building was sleeping forty meters from the burned trunk. So he walked them east toward the gentler ground by the old river. It took twenty minutes on the weak legs and Eren slowed down to match without saying anything about it. The clone didn’t thank him for that, and he wouldn’t, because Eren wouldn’t have either.

Halfway through the walk a fire bird screamed somewhere far back at the canopy and the clone flinched a tiny bit at the sound. Just a half second of his shoulders going up. Then he kept walking.

"You forget how loud they are when you haven’t heard them in a month," he muttered. "I used to set my whole day by that sound."

"I know."

"Yeah. I forgot. You know."

They didn’t say anything else until the river.

He found what he wanted in a damp dip behind a fallen log. Two slimes. Green, fist-and-a-half sized, the boring kind that did nothing but wobble around and occasionally headbutt a person with way too much confidence. The same kind that nearly killed Eren in his first week when he tripped on a root and one of them landed on his face and started melting his chest while he flailed on the ground like an idiot.

He looked at them now and almost laughed at himself.

"First week here one of these things actually almost killed me," he told the clone. "I tripped, it landed on me, my chest was on fire, I was screaming for my mom in my head. Lowest moment of my life and I’m including the day the bank rejected my loan."

"I remember." The clone almost smiled. "We never tell anyone that one."

"We never do." Eren dug the folding knife out of his belt and tossed it across the dip. "Take the knife. Don’t burn an arrow on a slime. You won’t get it back clean and the points cost too much."

The clone caught the knife with the kind of slow careful catch that the weak hands could still manage. He didn’t ask what Eren wanted. He already knew.

"Same slime same dip. You take one, I take the other," Eren said anyway, mostly because saying it out loud made it real. "Then we read whatever the system gives each of us."

He swept Observe over both of them first because he wasn’t going to run a test sloppy.

[Observe: Target Identified: Green Slime - Level 4]

-Status: Healthy

Same level. Same species. Two identical green jelly idiots wobbling around in the same patch of mud.

The clone stepped down into the dip first. He had every clean kill Eren had ever managed sitting in his head somewhere, every angle and every grip and every place to put the blade, but the problem was the body didn’t know any of it yet. The arms were weak and a little shaky from being twenty minutes old and the stab came out half a beat slow and uglier than it should have been. It still went through. The slime burst and the wobbling stopped and the clone went stiff for a second the way a person goes stiff when a screen pops in their face.

"Read it," Eren said. "I can’t see yours."

The clone read it out loud, careful, like he didn’t quite believe it himself yet.

[You gained 100% energy of Green Slime - Level 4]

[Congratulations! You have reached Level 2]

-All stats increased by 1

-You gained 1 Stat Point to distribute

He read it a second time without anyone asking him to.

"A hundred percent," he said. "Off a slime. And a level." He looked up. "I haven’t seen a level off anything in a month and the dumbest creature in the whole forest just gave me one."

Eren didn’t trust it yet. He walked down into the dip, put his boot over the second slime and pressed until it popped under his heel like a small water balloon. He knew exactly what the screen was going to say. He’d been watching it say the same thing for thirty straight days.

[You gained 000% energy of Green Slime - Level 4]

Three zeros. The same three zeros.

He stared at them for a few seconds anyway. Sometimes he’d been hoping, without ever telling Emily he was hoping, that one day the number would just be different. It never was. It wasn’t today either.

Same hole, same slime, the same second. I get nothing. He gets a hundred and a level. Why.

He started walking a tight little circle without realizing it. He always did that when his brain was actually working on something.

"It’s the lockout," he muttered. Mostly to himself. The clone could keep up. "It’s the whole zone. Every kill I make, every kill the elves ever made since the dragon, they all come back zeros. I saw why in the visions. The little Totem in the village ran all the experience for the whole region through itself, and the little Totem’s a burned puppet now, so the pipe’s cut for everybody who was plugged into it."

"And I was never plugged into it." The clone wiped the knife clean on a leaf. He didn’t even look up while he said it. "I got made twenty minutes ago, on the grass, by you. The system doesn’t have a file on me. Far as it’s concerned I just hatched out of the dirt like the wolves or the slimes or anything else wild."

"That’s it." Eren stopped pacing.

The clone kept wiping the knife. "The wolves out here keep getting stronger. The forest keeps spitting out higher levels every season. The lockout never hit any of that. It only hit the elves and you and your family and anyone the village system signed in. You’re a person with a broken pipe. I’m a wild animal on a working one."

"Yeah." Eren rubbed his jaw. The math was already running in his head. He goes out. He grinds. He eats everything he can survive eating. He maps the centaur border for me. He brings it all home when his timer runs out. Same as last time, except this time we knew before we cast. "Yeah. That works. That’s a way out."

He should have felt good about that. He almost did, for about two seconds.

Then a thought hit him sideways and his good mood died standing.

Fifty.

"Wait."

"What?" The clone looked up at him, eyes already narrowing because he could see where Eren was going from a mile off. They were the same person. That was the worst part of all of this.

"The thing under the ground." Eren said it slow. He didn’t want to say it fast because saying it fast would make it bigger than it already was. "The visions were clear. It built me to use. It bred the bloodline for generations, stacked me with custom skills, and it needed me at a level high enough to actually hold a mind that old without my head splitting open. Strong enough to be a vessel."

"Fifty," the clone said quietly. "It needs you at fifty."

"It needs me at fifty." Eren dragged a hand down his face. And the thing I’ve been cursing every day is the only reason I’m still me. I have to keep cursing it. I can’t stop cursing it. "I fix the system, I bring the levels back, anybody can grind again. Including me. And the second I cross fifty I hand it the body it grew my whole family tree to get."

The forest was quiet for a few seconds. A bird coughed somewhere far off in a way that didn’t sound like a bird.

"So you don’t cross fifty," the clone said. He said it without any drama, like a person filling in a clean line on a list. "Not while it’s still in the ground."

"Not until it’s dead and rotting all the way through," Eren said. "Whatever year that ends up being."

"Then you’ve got your reason to keep me out here." The clone shrugged. He folded the knife and clipped it to his pocket. "Every level I take is a level you don’t have to walk anywhere near. I can sit at twenty or forty or wherever the timer stops me. You can’t."

It was as gentle as the clone got. Eren took it.

Eren handed the bow over without making a speech about it. The matte black compound he’d bought outside Söke on one of Kalina’s papers, the quiver of two dozen aluminum arrows, the binoculars on a worn strap, the folding knife already pocketed, a small bag of those awful energy bars nobody at the farm would eat. The clone took it all and didn’t comment on any of it. He’d helped pick the bow a month ago in Eren’s own head and he didn’t need a tour.

He drew the bow halfway as a test and his arms shook and he let it down easy. Neither of them mentioned that in a week that draw weight would feel like nothing. The first copy had taught them both how fast it climbs out here.

"East," Eren said. "Find the centaur fence and map every meter of it. Patrol times, gaps, dead angles. I need a hole I can walk through without one of their Luck-bent arrows curving into the back of my skull from across the field. The rainbow bird wants ten golden fruits before it tells me anything useful and I’m not going into that grove blind like you did the first time."

"East. Map the horse people. Find the hole. Don’t get an arrow in my skull." The clone slung the quiver over the shirt that hung off him. "Arrows run out, I’ll cut new ones. I remember how."

"Don’t die before day ten this time."

"No promises on the dying. Solid yes on the mapping."

Eren didn’t drag it out. Standing in the woods with himself in the wrong body wasn’t a thing he wanted to keep doing all morning. He turned to an empty stretch of trees, pulled the door open with his own mana the easy way, the way that didn’t even need the Fragment, and the warm kitchen light spilled through. Somebody was banging a pot. Lyra’s voice was saying something he couldn’t quite catch. He stepped through and didn’t look back. The door closed behind him with the soft pop it always made and the smell of bread hit him before anything else did.

In the green spring forest the clone stood alone in the dip for a minute. He looked at where the door had been. Then he looked at the bow in his hands and laughed once, quietly, at nothing. It was the kind of laugh a man makes when he’s the only audience he’s got and he’s already exhausted by his own jokes.

"Forty days," he said to nobody. "Let’s not waste any."

He shouldered the quiver, hooked the binoculars properly across his chest and started walking east, slow on the weak legs, the way the first copy had walked everywhere in his first week before the system started leveling him out of being scrawny.

He hadn’t gone three hundred meters before he stopped, dropped flat behind a stand of ferns and lifted the binoculars. Far to the northeast, low against the hills past the river, a thin gray line was climbing into the bright spring sky. Smoke. The narrow careful kind that something lit on purpose and was trying to keep small.

Kobolds. Nothing else out here bothers with a fire.

He lowered the binoculars very quiet and worked an arrow loose from the quiver against the string. Then he started moving toward the smoke.