“Okay,” Isoko said, as they walked through the dark woods. “It’s really fucking dark now.”
Mark laughed, his voice echoing in the chittering, buzzing night—
And then some vector from the side, small and terribly hungry, slipped through the trees and aimed right at Mark. It was the size of a baseball and Mark could only react, putting his adamantium into the way of the whatever-it-was. The thing crashed into Mark’s blades, squeaked, and blood or something like it splattered on Mark’s face.
Mark slashed down at the thing, sending it to the ground, making sure to grab and kill every part of it. It crunched under Mark’s black metal, like… like an exoskeleton, maybe?
“What the fuck was that?” Isoko asked.
“I think it’s a bug,” Mark said, poking at the thing with his adamantium, feeling it in the dark. “Yeah. That’s a bug. A smaller version of the one that tried to take your head ten minutes ago, I think.” Mark flicked the monster into the woods, sending it deep into the shrubbery. It landed somewhere out of sight, which was not very far. “I can’t see shit.”
Something began lightly crunching on the bug’s body.
Mark and Isoko both said, “It’s back.”
“Yup,” Mark said, as Isoko went, “Oh yeah.”
Mark could barely see Isoko. The sky was black, the moon barely visible behind some deep clouds. Memphi was far to the south; far enough that the ambient glows were nearly gone. There was absolutely nothing out here. Not a damned thing.
Except for the monsters.
Isoko said, “So I vastly underestimated the number of monsters out in the wilds, and now we have head-charging bugs. Let’s stop?”
Mark agreed, and yet, there were a whole bunch of different ways to stop for the night.
Mark said, “I kinda want to go until we see other people and then hang out with some strangers out here, rather than us two alone in the woods together. I feel like any plan we make should go in that sort of direction.”
“We could build a fire and camp out right here? Get some people coming to our ‘tent’?” Isoko added, “If that’s how this works.”
Mark said, “I’ve read of a bunch of different ways. We’re in a known clearance territory, so if we build a defended fire then we should attract anyone out there in the woods, but even us talking like this probably has a few people out there with long range senses feeling us out, checking to see if we’re monsters. Now if we were in an actual exploration zone, then we’d never go out in the woods like this; we’d have a full team and we would have stopped for the night about an hour ago. But we’re here, where it’s safe enough to just… build a fire and watch people show up. Or, we can go until we see other people around fires.”
Silence.
… Except for all the bugs chirping, the birds making noise, and the monsters in the woods making weirder noises here and there, in the distance.
“We’re still on the main road?” Isoko shuffled around a little. “Right?”
“I could take out the GPS and check?”
“Nope! Let’s just start a fire and see what happens.” Isoko walked over to the woods, to the side of the path. Deadfall crushed under her feet as she sliced her sword through some undergrowth. “Here’s good, yeah?”
Mark began clearing the woods with Isoko, blades flying through young trees, as he said, “Seems good to me. You want to start the fire, or do you want me?”
“I would actually like some proper light sooner, rather than later, so can you do it?”
“Absolutely!” Mark felt around for a big enough tree—
Something tried to attack him, aiming at him with a desire to ‘KILL KILL!’, hissing loudly, fangs snapping in the dark. Mark slapped it aside and then tore it apart, whatever it was. He tossed it into the woods and went right back to chopping a tree into pieces. Soon, he drilled his metal into a long bit of wood and then spun it fast, twisting the metal as he turned the inside of the trunk to wood pulp. It was a wet tree, but with enough heat anything could burn. The tree trunk, all meter-long of it, simply took some extra time to get flames roaring out of holes Mark had drilled inside.
Soon, light returned in flickers and glows, and Isoko’s skin reflected it like a mirror. She was shivering a little in the dark, but she calmed when the light came back.
“I’ll drive some spikes into the ground to use as a backing,” Isoko said, “If you can carve them into shape for me?”
“Sure thing.
Soon, the two of them were sitting on a big log that Mark had carved out of a tree, a fire glowing in front of them, tree branches, like spikes, driven into the ground behind them by a good 4 meters. The short wall of tree spikes was just so that they could have a kinda-wall in one direction. It was a pretty decent campground, made all the more presentable by Mark shaving down shrubbery and trees and piling all of it into a pile, into a bonfire.
The bonfire soon roared into the night sky. It was smokey and hot, and Mark luxuriated in the warmth of it all while he purified the smoke from reaching him. Isoko did, too, her entire body still fully platinum, her heart beating with resilience and weakness, just like Mark’s. Isoko’s face relaxed, but her Power did not.
By the time they had gotten to that point with the fire, Mark had killed four beasts, two of them wolf-types, and the other two cat-types that had tried to pounce down from the trees. Isoko had killed ten, eagerly flashing her temporarily-platinum wooden sword through various monstrous bodies. They had kicked those bodies into the deep darkness far away from the fire, and though the monster out there had vanished a few times, it had come back a few more times.
Bones crunched in the black of deep night, the monster unwilling to allow itself to be seen—
Suddenly, the crunching stopped.
“It stopped again,” Isosko said, as she looked around. She frowned. “I don’t sense any monsters yet… Not at all, actually. I thought I got the last ones… Mmm.”
Mark was already Unionsensing whatever was out there and he got three impressions of vectors pointed at the fire, and then off to the side, to Mark and Isoko. Something was watching them from the dark, making decisions. They had been walking this way for a minute, according to what Mark had been seeing out there, but a lot of things were circling the camp right now.
Isoko had asked Mark not to point them out until they became a problem; she wanted to test herself, as well.
But these three were a problem… maybe.
Mark said, “I think these ones are people.”
The three vectors were coming from the south, from Memphi’s direction, and they were now fully focused on Mark, as he named them as much as he could.
Mark asked Isoko, “Can you tell where they are?”
Isoko shook her head. She stood up, though, and called out, “Hello, to the hunters! Come share the fire, if you wish!”
Some unknown woman’s voice called out from the north, though she was at the south, “You two are barely 25 miles from the city and you’re stopping for the night?”
Isoko paused. She glanced northward, looked confused, but decided to speak toward the north anyway, saying, “It’s a lot darker out here than we thought! I expected moonlight; not endless cloud cover.”
Isoko was looking north, but the vector of her attention was focused south, east, and west; every direction that wasn’t north.
Some male voice from the south called out, “What’s a fucking healer doing out here with just one guy? Are you two fucking idiots, or something?”
“Maybe it’s a lover’s outing,” said another woman’s voice, at the south, as she stepped into the light, smiling. She was mousy, wearing all-black maybe-leather armor, her helmet in her hands. “Hi there! I’m Sherry, and it’s a really dark night. We got stopped from going further, too.” She hooked her helmet to her belt and she pulled around her backpack, saying, “I got hotdogs to grill on sticks if you want some!”
Another woman, taller and darker and in similarly black gear as Sherry, stepped out of the dark, beside a man who could have passed as a brother for either woman.
Isoko said, “I’m Isoko, a Paladin of Freyala, so there’s no need to break into your food rations if you don’t want to. We’ve got sustenance going. Mark over here is doing the bulk of that, if you want to partake.”
Mark smiled as he stood up. “You guys hungry?”
The guy was frowning as he took off his helmet, saying, “You two have some sort of fucking deathwish or some shit? Being out here with a major fire?” He thumbed at himself. “Jed. Brawny. Hitter.”
The taller woman hooked her helmet to her belt as she said, “Cindy. Air Shaper. Scout.”
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Mark wasn’t quite familiar with those methods of identifying oneself, so he played along as best as he could, saying, “Mark. Metalshaper and Union. Scout and hitter.”
Isoko said, “Isoko. Brawny hitter and Union.”
Sherry happily put away her hot dogs, smiling as she said, “And I’m Sherry! Drainer; versatile hitter. And we would gladly take you up on your offers of sustenance.”
Her smile did not reach her eyes; she was still wary.
Mark connected the three of them to the world, breathing in sustenance and deprivation as he hit them with a braindance of purity/impurity to clean them of whatever they might have going on, and then he began beating in time to their hearts a dance of resilience and weakness. He turned off the Union of Brain and watched as the three new people each jolted a little, probably feeling comfortable, as he offered, “Want me to carve you up some stools to sit on? Isoko is providing clarity of thought so the body doesn’t really need to sleep.”
Sherry relaxed, her smile turning genuine as she happily said, “Well aren’t you just some nice people! It’s so nice to meet nice people. I will happily take a stool. Thank you so much!”
Mark smiled a little as he carved a tree into makeshift stools. He cut off branches and canopy and threw those pieces into the fire, sending up a fountain of sparks into the air and blossoming heat into the night. It felt good. And then Mark got carving onto the trunk. Rapidly, Mark ended up with a few 2-foot long sections. He took each section, which was about a foot wide, and carved the bottoms so they had three prongs, so it sat level wherever it got placed, and then he leveled the top, turning them into somewhat-comfortable seats.
All of that took less than five minutes.
The team of three watched the whole time.
Mark sat the new seats about four meters away from Mark and Isoko’s own bench seating—
Sherry asked, “Are you two looking for a team? Because we’re headed north and then west, aiming at a 250 mile trip. We do one round trip a month. A week in the woods nets us each 1,200 goldleaf a piece! We could hit up big targets with you two on our side, though, and go after a 2.5k goal every month. Easy money~”
“Thank you, but no thank you,” Isoko said, “We’re here to pursue some bandits who might have just been some opportunistic thieves. We’re headed up to Wolf Bayou for the investigation.”
Sherry, Jed, and Cindy, got a concerned look to them—
Sherry recovered fastest, smiling wide and sitting down on one of the stools, saying, “Well that’s a plum shame, but good luck on your own hunt. I ain’t never heard of bandits around here, but I have heard of a lot of desperate exiled folks.”
Jed grumbled, “There were bandits a few years ago. I heard the city watch drove them all away.” He took a seat, frowning at Mark and Isoko. “You two are taking a lot of risks. You two actually Inquisitors?”
Isoko said, “They want Mark to be one of those, but I’m not headed in that direction.”
Sherry, Jed, and Cindy all focused on Mark.
Mark grinned a little. “Not an Inquisitor yet… It still freaks me out that people would hurt other people. I don’t want anything to do with any of that.”
“And that’s a good thing!” Sherry said, smiling. It looked like a real smile this time, too. “Are you two really not interested in a teamup?”
“No thank you,” Isoko said.
“No thanks,” Mark said.
Sherry nodded. “I had to ask again. So! That’s enough questions for me. From the looks of things, you two are completely new around here, aren’t you? But you have no fear of the dark, which means you’re strong, and with a goal like hunting opportunistic killers, then I’d certainly believe that. Me and my sister and brother have been around this place a long time. This is year 11 we’ve been doing this. So how can we help you do what you need to do around here?”
Mark felt at ease.
Isoko probably felt the same way, for a tension in her shoulders vanished, and her vector calmed down.
Mark said, “I’d love to know what you three know about Wolf Bayou. I heard it’s a fucked up place, with the leader being some sort of Daihoonian Queen? A contemporary of the God of War and Murder, Drakarok, when he was still just a guy?” Mark saw Jed roll his eyes some, while Cindy relaxed on to her chair and Sherry looked like she was waiting for a moment to speak. Mark would have said more, but there was a new problem. Mark added, “Just one second, though. There’s— That. Yes. You see it. I got frontal attack.”
Eyes glowed in the woods to the side, small and vibrant yellow, belonging to a good four wolves that were prowling in the dark, circling the fire, aiming for the humans by the fire.
Mark hopped through the air, directly at the problem, traversing 10 meters of distance in a single second. Two wolves went directly for him, maws open all across their bodies, eyes glowing all down their backs. Malformations; not exactly ‘wolves’. The other two malformation wolves circled to the side, going after Isoko. Mark killed his two enemies and Isoko killed a third, while Sherry turned the fourth into a husk of dried skin and bone. Soon enough, Jed tossed the dried malformation into the fire where it caught flame instantly and burned, while Mark flicked the other three bodies into the dark woods. Cindy enveloped the fire in wind, keeping the smoke away from them as they all sat back down.
Sherry began, “So that’s some impressive metalwork.”
“Thank you,” Mark said. “Where was I— Oh yeah. Wolf Bayou. What’s it li—”
Something started crunching on the dead malformations in the dark.
The three guests looked at the dark. They didn’t seem too nervous, but they were cautious.
Mark looked at the dark, too.
Isoko said, “We have no idea what sort of monster is making that noise in the dark. We went after it a few times, but it goes away when we get close.”
Mark had been about to say something along those lines. Isoko had gotten there first, so Mark asked, “What is it? Do you know?”
The three guests seemed to relax a little as Isoko spoke, and Mark asked his question.
“I’m pretty sure I know what it is,” Sherry said, as she glanced to Cindy. Cindy nodded. Sherry said to Mark and Isoko, “It’s a dark eater. They do exactly what that thing is doing; eating in the dark. The people who have seen one say that they look like snails with the shell, but it’s more like a tentacle beast that has a shell, and the shell is some sort of ‘invisible dark’. That’s what the mages I’ve met tell me about them. If you can capture one then they sell for a lot of money, but you need special Talents to do that. They’re not harmless at all. They will eat you if you present as a target, but as long as you’re not already dead, then you’re not a target.”
Mark asked, “So we don’t need to worry about them?”
“Usually not, but I wouldn’t get comfortable,” Sherry said.
“It’s fucking unnerving,” Jed said, “I hate the fucking things.”
Sherry cheerfully said, “They follow people and eat the corpses they leave behind. You don’t see much of them beyond the rivers and other bodies of water because they’re aquatic things most of the time. They’re really quite harmless as far as monsters go.”
Isoko asked, “What kind of monsters around here are the dangerous ones?”
Sherry smiled brightly, illuminated by the equally bright fire, as she began, “We’ve been at this for 11 years, as I said, and in that time we’ve seen some really nasty ones. Why this one time when we were up around Walnut Ridge— Oh! That’s an old settlement that still has some trade every now and then, directly northwest of Memphi at about 40 miles away from the Northwest Rivergate, down Route NW-4. Anyway. At Walnut Ridge they were having this burrower problem…”
Mark and Isoko listened to stories about monster hunts for a few hours, and it was wonderful. Sherry was nice to listen to, and soon the other two, Cindy and Jed, opened up about their own experiences hunting. The three of them were siblings that had been hunting together for the last 11 years, with Sherry as the oldest and Jed as the youngest, and all of them around 30 now.
All the while, other people came out from the dark to share in the light, and Mark and Isoko spread the healing and sustenance around. Soon, they had 12 people in that clearing in the woods, and Mark found the whole experience wonderful.
Eventually, though, the sky cleared, clouds moving on, and the moon came out, bathing the world in silver and just a little bit of gold from all those cracks in the lunar surface. Mark and Isoko decided to move on with their trips, and that started the breakup of the camp. They were all just waiting out the clouds, anyway.
Cindy killed the bonfire with a twist of air, ripping the firelight from the gathering and allowing the moon to shine like it should have been shining.
Mark watched as Isoko watched Cindy wield the wind to crush the flames into embers. Isoko was clearly feeling some kinda way at that moment, but it wasn’t Mark’s business to intrude on that. But he did lean in to her and whisper, “Want me to hold up a log for you to sit on and we can metalshape-fly down the path for a few dozen miles?”
“Yes,” Isoko said, without reservation.
Mark grinned at that.
Soon, Mark said goodbye to his new acquaintances as he held Isoko up on a log, with two ends of the log wrapped in thin bands of black metal. It was rather secure seating.
And then Mark raced down the path, under the moonlight, Isoko glittering platinum as she floated beside him, smiling wide, luxuriating in the feeling of ‘flight’.
The monsters didn’t attack much when the moon was out and the prey was chugging along at 35 miles per hour, which was really nice.
Mark made great time and Isoko seemed to love ‘flying’.
But the joy ride had to end eventually. Something big jumped out of the woods. It was the size of a van, and Mark sent Isoko up into the air as Mark backed away, drawing the monster’s attention. Mark had meant to throw Isoko clear of the monster, but Isoko came down right on top of it, her sword flashing platinum as she drove it into the head of the big monster. Mark ended up standing back, supporting her with Union, as Isoko carved a monstrous boar asunder. She held onto thick fur with platinum hands on as the monster bucked and kicked and tried to gore her with its tusks.
Mark focused his Union fully on durability, making sure Isoko could tank the monster’s attacks just fine, and Isoko probably did the same, considering how the tusks of the boar skidded off of her, sparking in the night. The boar didn’t get many chances to hurt her, though.
Isoko rapidly made quick work of the monster.
Stab! Stab! Stab! Into the head and out the eye.
The monster squealed and roared and crashed into a few trees, and it even blinked in and out of existence a few times, reappearing full body-lengths away from where it had originally been. It was a blinking boar.
But Isoko held on, even as the monster moved around wildly, and she kept stabbing.
Mark was pretty sure he heard Isoko roaring right back at the beast.
Soon, the boar fell over, its dark body covered in a dark slick, moonlight shining overhead as Isoko stood triumphant over its severed head. She was covered in a dark slick herself, but that blood flaked away, and soon she was just standing, platinum in the moonlight, grinning.
Triumphant.
Isoko happily said, “I’ll run now, but thanks for the lift, Mark.”
Mark winced. “Sorry. I meant to throw you clear of the monster. Not… onto the monster.”
“Oh! I, uh, I aimed at it. I thought you meant to do that?”
Mark paused. “… You can aim when you’re thrown?”
“Well no. But I can certainly twist some and aim. And I think the boar wanted me to fall on top of it. It tried to gore me! Did you see that?”
“I did see that! I’m glad it worked out, too.”
Isoko chuckled.
She started running.
Mark kept up.