Light Bringer: New World[LitRPG, Fantasy, a very crazy idea]

Dragging a body weighing nearly sixty pounds across potholed sidewalks was no task for a nine-year-old girl. Maybe not even for a twenty-year-old adult.

Maria pulled Dante by the wrists, walking backward, digging her heels into the hard-packed dirt at the road’s edge. With every yard gained, the worn soles of the boy’s sneakers scraped along the ground, leaving a continuous trail of dust mingled with black, sticky drops of blood.

The air was cold, but sweat trickled down her forehead, plastering stray strands from her braids against her cheek.

If the police drive by right now, I’m ending up in that juvenile home across the river.

She stopped every ten steps to look both ways. The street was deserted. Most streetlamps along the block had burned out, leaving only isolated pools of yellow light where stray mongrels rooted through plastic trash bags. Not a single dog barked. When she passed by with the bleeding boy, the animals merely lifted their snouts, sniffed the sulfur stench clinging to his clothes, and slunk back into empty lots with their tails between their legs.

The side gate to Maria’s house had no padlock, just a loop of rusted wire binding the grating to the post. She dropped Dante’s arms onto the concrete floor, pushed open a gap with her shoulder without letting the iron squeak, and dragged the boy into the backyard.

The small laundry area sat there: a twin concrete washbasin with a loose metal faucet, two cracked plastic tubs, and a wire clothesline where a few old towels had been drying since morning. Right beside it, a wooden door opened directly into the back shed, once used to store tools and now serving as a space for her to stack shoe boxes and bundles of clothes her mother intended to rework on the sewing machine.

The floor consisted of cold, grimy tiles. Maria dragged Dante to the corner, away from the window facing the house’s interior hallway.

On the other side of the brick wall, her brother’s heavy snoring rumbled steadily on, blending with the static hiss of the television left running all night in the living room.

She pulled the wooden door shut quietly, sliding the latch in place with the tips of her fingers.

In the darkness of the shed, the luminous screen hovered before her eyes, transparent and still.

[Target: Dante Miller.]

[Health Points: 3/12.]

[Status: Active Bleeding, Thermal Shock, Infernal Ash Contamination.]

As she watched, the number three flickered. In silence, the line shifted.

[Health Points: 2/12.]

”Don’t you dare die now, kid,” she muttered in a harsh whisper, dropping to her knees beside him. ”I nearly snapped my spine dragging you here.”

She pulled the zipper of his gray jacket. The fabric had stuck to his skin with dried blood, peeling back with a short tearing sound. Dante let out a weak gasp through his nose, but his eyes remained rolled back, eyelids fluttering.

The three gashes began near his floating rib and ran down the side of his abdomen. The wound was not bleeding in normal crimson pulses. The edges of the flesh bore a grayish, almost bluish tint, oozing small, dark clotted lumps that smelled like spoiled metal.

The screen in Maria’s vision trembled, rearranging lines of text with mechanical detachment.

[Suggested Emergency Stabilization Protocol:]

[Step 1: Mechanical removal of superficial toxic residues.]

[Step 2: Chemical cauterization or continuous pressure on the vascular source.]

[Warning: The rate of life drain will reduce the target to zero in approximately 4 minutes.]

”Four minutes!?” Maria nearly screamed, slapping both hands over her mouth before the full sound could escape. ”Damn it, I have to move.”

Maria sprang to her feet, keeping her steps soundless. She went to the laundry area, grabbed a blue plastic basin, and opened the basin tap slowly, letting the water trickle quietly down the side without splashing. She snatched two old face towels from the line, a chunk of yellow bar soap from the ceramic dish, and darted into the kitchen through the back door.

From the medicine cabinet above the refrigerator, she grabbed a nearly empty bottle of rubbing alcohol, a roll of grimy medical tape, and a pair of blunt-nosed scissors.

When she slipped back into the shed, Dante’s lips were already chalk white. His breathing had grown so shallow that his chest barely rose.

[Health Points: 2/12 (Declining).]

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She soaked the corner of a towel in cold water, worked the yellow soap into a thin lather, and pressed it ruthlessly against the rim of the uppermost laceration.

The boy’s body jerked upward. His heels drummed against the tiled floor, and a muffled groan ripped through his clenched throat.

”Stay still,” she ordered, pinning his shoulder with her left hand and throwing all her body weight into keeping his torso pinned down.

The water on the towel came away black on the first swipe. The grime coating the raw flesh wasn’t ordinary soil, it looked like coal soot blended with coarse grit. She scrubbed until the surrounding skin regained a color resembling living human flesh. With every wipe, the boy shuddered from head to foot, his fingernails scraping against the stained tiles.

[Infernal Ash Contamination reduced by 60%.]

The blood began welling up brighter, trickling down toward the floor.

Maria grabbed the bottle of alcohol. She knew how badly it stung because her mother used the same thing whenever she scraped her knees on the street pavement. Without a second thought, she poured the clear liquid straight into the three open cuts.

Dante snapped his eyes open for half a second, blown pupils staring up into the dark ceiling as air fled his lungs in a long, desperate hiss. His back arched, his fingers clutching the hem of her red dress with shocking strength for someone on the brink of death, and his teeth slammed together hard enough to crack loudly in the room.

Then his head dropped back, knocked completely cold again.

[Contamination eradicated.]

[Warning: Traumatic shock active.]

[Health Points: 1/12.]

The number one began to throb with an insistent crimson glow.

”Stop blinking, damn it.” Maria tossed the alcohol-soaked towel aside and folded the second dry towel into four thick layers.

She pressed the bundle of cloth directly over his torn ribs.

The screen hovering before her eyes projected a silver circular reticle, aimed precisely where the blood welled up thickest between the ribs.

[Pressure point identified. Apply constant force of 15 to 20 kilogram-force.]

Maria had no idea what a kilogram-force meant, but she understood the ring. She brought both knees up against the floor, planted both palms flat against the cloth, and leaned the full weight of her chest and shoulders downward, locking her elbows.

Warm blood seeped through the weave of the fabric, staining her palms.

Time seemed to stall. In the neighboring room, the television static droned monotonously. A motorcycle with an open exhaust roared down the main avenue, its engine rattling the shed’s thin windowpane.

Maria’s arms began burning at the shoulders. Her wrists clicked twice under the strain of holding her posture. She kept her gaze glued to that stubborn red line anchored on the number one.

Hurry up. Stop bleeding.

A strange tingling rose through her fingertips. It didn’t stem from physical strain. It was a warm sensation that started at the nape of her neck, crept down her arms, and flowed through the skin of her hands into the blood-soaked fabric.

The silver circle in her vision flared with brighter intensity.

[Initial Life Affinity manifested via Support Matrix.]

[Induced clotting acceleration.]

The pressure pushing up against the cloth began to recede. The texture of the blood beneath her fingers thickened until the push against the boy’s ribs met firm resistance.

Maria didn’t lift her hands. She remained there, kneeling on the cold floor, breathing through her mouth to shut out the smell of rubbing alcohol mingled with blood, silently counting every passing second.

When she finally drew her body up slowly, rolling her shoulders back as a sharp ache jabbed her lower back, the cloth had bonded to the wound. Blood was no longer spilling onto the tiles.

The screen displayed a prompt in crisp lettering.

[Hemorrhage arrested successfully.]

[Target Status updated: Stable (Critical).]

[Health Points: 1/12 (Natural recovery active: +1 HP every 6 hours under rest).]

Maria let out all the breath she had held inside her chest. The wave of relief hit so heavily that she slid back onto the floor, propping her back against a stack of cardboard boxes.

She grabbed the roll of medical tape and wound three long strips around the boy’s torso, securing the folded towel tightly against his ribs so the bandage wouldn’t slip if he shifted in his sleep.

Dante was breathing steadily now. His skin remained pale, with deep purplish circles under his eyes, but his chest rose and fell without that dry, rattling rasp.

The interface before Maria shifted once more.

[Quest [Protect the Light] - Progress Update:]

[Target Stabilization: Complete.]

[Current Progress: 30%.]

[Partial Reward Unlocked: Vitality Perception (Passive).]

Maria looked down at her hands. They were caked in dried blood, the skin of her palms wrinkled from dirty water and alcohol. No visible magic lingered on them, yet when she looked back at Dante, a slender, dark-green bar floated over his chest, displaying one over twelve with the clarity of a digital readout.

She got up on numb legs, headed out to the laundry area, scrubbed her arms and face in freezing water from the basin with the leftover yellow soap until her skin burned, and returned to the shed carrying a battered cotton blanket from atop the clean clothes basket.

She draped the blanket over the boy, covering him to his neck.

Dante looked smaller now that he was clean and quiet. Stripped of that torn jacket and the foul smoke trailing him in the alley, he was just a boy her age, with a thin face and hair dusted with grime.

Maria sat down on the tiled floor beside him, hugging her knees to fend off the cold seeping up from below.

”Tomorrow you’re going to explain what this whole mess is about...” she murmured into the dark, shutting her eyes as the television murmurs in the living room slowly faded from her mind.