A groan spreads out through the crowd, a cluster of swears muttered under the breath, and the general slouching of shoulders in disappointment. I find it interesting to watch the shift of the crowd, entirely different sections reacting to the news at their own intervals, the different speakers in the different languages somewhat staggered in relaying the news. The loudest groan I hear comes from Coriander as she sets her face in her hands. I peek toward Arabella and find her preening as the crowd’s mood sours, staring up and watching the passing clouds with a grin.
“I, on behalf of the Willian Guild, apologize profusely for the delay,” the woman calling herself Gaeth Moore says. I turn back to look toward the stage. “This delay, unavoidable, must still be a heavy blow for those of you who have been preparing for this day for so long, years in some cases. I will now lay out for you what you are to expect for tonight and tomorrow.”
The woman continues to speak, but I find it difficult to listen to after a while. She announces what the different tents that are being set up around the parade ground will be hosting tonight, delineates where to go for different cuisines at the evening’s meal–apparently there are people from very far away in attendance–and where lodgings can be found among the tents if they are required. Looking from my seat on the risers, I can see more than twenty of the huge tents still being erected in the stretch of grassy plains around us.
“The Passage of Rising Tide will begin as the sun rises in the morning,” Gaeth says, bringing my attention back to her. “At that time, the participants will need to be in attendance here at the stage to be given their initiation into the contest by the administrator. Make certain to have your affairs in order before then, you will not be returning for some time.” With her piece said, Gaeth takes a step back on the stage, waiting for the rest of the speakers to be finished with their own pronouncements before they all turn and leave together.
The grumbling of the crowd continues, but the mention of delicious and free food has blunted the aggravation somewhat. I pop my neck as I stand, the chill in the air seeping in through my heavy clothes and tightening my joints.
“I could eat,” Kendon says, standing and tapping his brother on his shoulder.
“Sure,” Macille agrees. He leans on the steel railing that lines the edge of the risers and looks out on the expanse of magical vehicles and two-toned tents, red and gold. “I have never even heard of half of those places she mentioned. The food could be something interesting to try.”
“I’m not sure that eating something exotic the night before a big competition begins is the wisest move,” Kendon replies.
“No sense of adventure,” Jor’Mari says, standing and making his way toward the stairs. “Is it not in the knight’s mandate to expand one’s horizons when possible. There are people here from continents away, and you would rather find a taste of home than intermingle.”
“I generally would,” Kendon says, his eyes tracking something in the crowd below. “Though, there may be some things exotic that are worth trying.”
I roll my eyes, readying to stand and make my own way off the risers, but Coriander just about pushes me down to get up first. “I am returning to the manor,” she says before I can even think to get angry at her blatant rudeness. “I wasted so much time today already.” Without another word she marches down the steel stairway of the risers, slipping into the crowd.
“She has a poor attitude,” Jor’Mari quips to himself. He looks at the two elf brothers. “Staying to known fields?”
“I might explore some,” Macille says. “No harm in it.” He looks at me, but before he can ask, I shake my head.
“I’ll explore on my own,” I tell him.
“That might not be safe,” he says. “We do not know these people.” He gestures to the crowd clearing out of the space in front of the stage.
“Thank you for the consideration,” I say. I give him a smile and am glad when he returns it. “However, I will still be going alone. I’ve been cooped up in that house for so long, time to stretch my legs and enjoy my own company for a little while.”
Macille’s smile falters at my words, but Kendon hooks an arm around his neck before the mood can take him. “I guess the men are on their own today,” he says into Macille’s ear. “Same as it ever was.”
“Do enjoy yourselves,” Arabella says, moving toward the stairway. Her soul presence spreads away from her as she walks, and I watch as it subtly guides people away from her, giving her plenty of room to be comfortable. “Do not squander this temporary reprieve. Tomorrow, I imagine that it will be far more exciting, dangerous too.”
Me and the boys spend a while standing on the risers, watching the crowd as it continues to pass below us. I watch Kendon and Jor’Mari throw verbal barbs back and forth at one another, though the bite seems to have been taken out of the words. Over the past few weeks, the two have found their mutual distaste turn into something more like a real rivalry. I can appreciate that. I’m still not sure what I can do to make Coriander stop hating me as much as she evidently does.
I wait for the three of them to head off toward some tent they believed would have a lot of spiced meat inside. I cannot wait for everyone to leave the field, people stand and speak with one another here and there, but once I feel like no one will be paying special attention to me, I head down, away from the direction most others went. For the whole while we were on the risers, I could not stop looking at the forest that loomed in front of me like buildings. After ten minutes, when I have reached the furthest tent set up nearest the forest, I see that I am not alone in my thinking.
About twenty others loiter on the far side of the tent facing the trees, looking up at the trees that shoots three-hundred feet or more toward the sky. A quick scan confirms that they are all first ranks like me, fourteen humans, two dwarven men that look to be brothers, an elven woman, and a Hartfolk man who bleeds a green light off the cracks in his skin where Mr. Mason would red. A few more continue toward the tent where we have gathered, but I ignore them for the most part.
Ahead of us–the edge of the tree line is only fifty feet or so now–a human man stands with arms crossed over his broad chest. Two wings of dark feathers sprout from the man’s back. He eats the leg of roast bird while leaning on the pommel of a huge hammer as he stares back at the forming group.
Kendrik Mance
Earthshaker Conflux(Rank Three)
A man, nineteen or so, breaks away from the milling crowd of rank ones hanging back toward the edge of the parade area, walking straight toward the rank three man. The clothing he wears is fine, blue leather, but looks well-worn and used. He carries on his hip what I might have mistaken for a wand if it weren’t for the fact that the cylinder of wood was nearly three and a half feet long. A tension falls over this makeshift group as he walks, but the rank three merely looks the man over as he approaches. When the rank one in blue passes by the rank three, the winged man with the hammer making no move to stop him, he turns and looks back at the rest of us milling about near the tent, signing a salute before he runs off into the forest.
Galea appears next to me as the group of young rank ones around me all seem to break into a run at once, racing into the forest behind the rank three guardian. “Far be it for me to ask,” Galea says as I start to walk. “Why would you wish to head into the forest Mistress Charlene?”
“Something that Gaeth Moore said,” I reply to the dragon in my head. “She said that we needed to prepare ourselves since we wouldn’t be returning for some time.” I nod toward the looming forest, though I doubt the dragon needs me to do so. “I am willing to bet that the place we won’t be returning from is there.”
Even I know that it is only a guess. For all I know, as soon as whatever initiation that happens tomorrow is over, we might all pack onto the flying vehicles that brought us to this place and head somewhere else. Maybe we will all be led into the city of Grim for whatever competition is planned, or there could even be a huge cave nearby that will be used. Perhaps there is some other wild thing planned that I can’t even begin to guess. There probably is, but I can’t plan for what I can’t know. Besides, what would be the point of bringing hundreds of talented rank ones(and me) to this huge forest with mountains and giant stone walls cutting us off on all sides if they weren’t going to use the forest?
“Ah,” Galea says, floating along next to me. “So, you wish to go into the forest to get a head start on the competition.”
“Something like that,” I reply.
I make it up to the huge man Volaash’s Eye tells me is named Kendrik and nod to the man. He swallows the piece of meat that he is eating and meets my eye. The other rank ones that seemed to have come to the same conclusion as I did have long since entered the forest.
“Anything I should know?” I ask Kendrik.
“About what in particular,” he says.
“Can you tell me anything about what is in the forest?”
“Monster,” he says. He smiles at me and takes another bite. “Loads of ‘em.”
I look at the wall of trees that cuts a perfect line across the prairie, stretching toward the mountain ranges in the East and West. It looks as if it is already nighttime inside of the forest despite it still not even being noon out where I stand. “Anything else?”
“Be back in the morning for the initiation,” he says. “Don’t make me have to go pull you out in the night. I might get so annoyed that you end up missing the initiation. Wouldn’t want that now, would we?”
“No,” I say. “I will make certain to return.”
He shrugs and turns back to studying the rows of tents stretching out in front of him. “Don’t die before we even really begin. It would reflect poorly on your sponsor.”
I nod to the man and roll the stiffness out of my shoulders. After a deep inhale, I set off at a sprint toward the tree line, knowing that I only have a few hours to explore anything before I need to return.
However cold I thought it was outside of the forest fails to compare to how cold it is inside. The chill of nighttime invades me as soon as I have made it into the shade cast by the impossibly tall trees, and a hundred feet past the tree line, snow begins to speckle the ground here and there. I focus on my dragonfire, building a Dragonfire Bolt in my right hand to warm myself. It only takes me about twenty-five seconds to over channel the ability now.
I stop my running after a few minutes, looking up into the canopy overhead, squinting. I had thought that there would be monsters everywhere in the forest. I had thought that I even spotted some of them, shadowed, when we first arrived, but I have been in the forest now for more than ten minutes and nothing has come jumping out of the woods.
Everyone else that ran into the woods is gone now as well. I can’t even find a footprint left in the crunched snow to mark that anyone else is in here other than myself. The silence of the forest presses down on me, broken intermittently by the sound of creaking branches far overhead. I begin to wonder what exactly it is that I am doing here when movement, just the barest thing, catches my eye.
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It is impossible to see clearly, a shadow shifting more than a hundred feet up the side of one of the trees nearest me. I focus on the wavering branch, trying to make out any detail about the dark figure laying atop of it.
A window appears above the shadow.
Alpha Climbing Python
“How can you tell what it is?” I ask, keeping my eye on the shadow.
Galea appears next to me, also staring up at the spot high in the tree above. “You are the one whose eye it is that I live inside of.”
“Then, how can I tell what it is?” I ask.
“You perceive it; the Eye of Volaash understands it. The process is simple, yet infinitely complex. Thus, Mistress Charlene requires such a sophisticated spirit like myself in order to operate it properly. How lucky Mistress Charlene is that I am around.”
“Well, that was a great non-answer,” I tell her.
“Thank you.”
I don’t even bother to sigh as I take a few steps to the side to get a better sight of the monster up in the tree. My eye said that it is a monster anyway. I am willing to trust it.
I swing my arm in an arc, hurling the Dragonfire Bolt in my hand up at the tree like a missile. There is a shift of motion as the ball of fire soars up at the tree branch where I aimed, but the monster only has a second to react. It fails to do so. I’ve heard before that snakes don’t do so well in the cold, that they get slow and lazy when they don’t have the sun to warm them up. The python barely manages to shift on the branch before my fire explodes around it, rocking the branch, cracking the air and silence in the forest.
The python hisses as it falls out of the tree, only taking a second or two to crack on the ground about ten feet away from me, spraying a splash of blood through the thin snow that lines the forest floor. I feel the fall in my bones and stare down at the corpse of the monster with a strange mix of anxiety and triumph. Galea flies in front of me, carrying a message window for me to look at.
You have defeated Alpha Climbing Python
I read the message a few times more, feeling a bit let down by how easy it had been. This was supposed to be a rank one monster after all.
The disappointment only lasts a split second. I have just killed a rank one monster, and it took me only a few seconds, maybe a minute if you include the time to over channel my ability. I toss another uncharged bolt into the corpse just to make sure that it is dead before walking over and prodding it with the toe of my boot. The snake is more than ten feet long, black scales on top with a mix of green and beige on its belly. I lean down to look the monster in the eye, noting that it looks an awful lot like the Alpha Boiling Python that Halford killed a few months ago.
Remembering that day, how I had almost let one of the lesser monsters drown and strangle me, a shudder runs down my spine. “I’ve come pretty far,” I say to myself.
“You certainly have Mistress Charlene. Though, I believe that the fall did most of the work,” Galea adds.
“Thanks.”
She isn’t wrong. I can see the spot where my big Dragonfire Bolt hit the snake, a scorch mark about halfway down its side. It doesn’t appear that I even managed to hit the monster head-on, just close enough that the explosion blew it out of the tree.
“Seems like a bad idea to climb so high up the tree when falling will kill you,” I say, looking down at the monster. I rake my fingernails lightly along its dark scales, activating my Disenchantment ability. The monster disappears into pink, sparkling smoke, but instead of condensing together as it usually does, the smoke disappears into the air. A message window appears just in front of me.
16.2lbs. of Alpha Climbing Python meat has been added to inventory
40lbs. of Alpha Climbing Python scales has been added to inventory.
Alpha Climbing Python fang has been added to inventory.
3 silver has been added to inventory.
16 copper has been added to inventory.
It only takes me a split second to open the window that displays the inventory granted to me by my magic ring. I find some more of the empty boxes have been filled, little pictures of the items inside of the boxes represent the new contents. I reach my hand into the box labeled as the python’s fang, feeling my fingers touch the smooth texture of bone. I pull it out, turning the five-inch-long fang over in my hand.
Alpha Climbing Python Fang(Uncommon)
The fang of an Alpha Climbing Python. This creature, while not overly dangerous, was an alpha of its kind, and therefore was just beginning to influence itself with ambient mana. This fang carries trace remnants of Acid, Poison, and Strength mana.
I could see the mana on the fang as well, the faintest of shimmering green and black that bled off it into the air. I twirl the fang a few times between my fingers, interested as to what it might be worth if I tried to sell it off. Something hammering into my back knocks my body into the snow and the air from my lungs. I cough, propping myself up on an elbow and roll over to look up at the trees overhead.
Rock Tellemur
Another monster sits fifty feet up in a nearby tree, peering down at me. It looks like an oversized monkey with four arms and two tails, its fur too dark to tell the color of in the low light. I see the shifting of a shadow as the monster hurls something at me. I spring backwards, rolling to my feet and jumping back out of the way as a rock the size of my head crashes down into the snow where I just was. A few weeks ago, the stone would have split my head open; I would have been unable to get out of the way. My speed isn’t what it used to be, however.
Galea is gone. I’ve noticed that she often disappears once fighting starts. I can still see where the Rock Tellemur is despite it hiding in the shade of the trees overhead and start to over channel a Dragonfire Bolt as I run for cover behind the trunk of another huge tree. The trees here are so big that there is no less than twenty feet between them and so wide around that it takes me a good ten seconds to get behind it for cover. As I run I hear another rock crash into the snow behind me, but I don’t pay it any mind.
I feel my breathing picking up as the danger of the situation starts to settle on me. There is fear in the back of my head that tries to come to the fore. I don’t allow it. Sure, this monkey is bigger than me, but compared to the Desert Spearman, it is a wimp.
I hear the Rock Tellemur screech in frustration on the other side of the tree as I gather myself on the far side. It’s been twenty seconds; my fire is nearly at its peak. I hear another rock thunk into the trunk of the tree I shelter against, sending a vibration through it.
“Not so smart then,” I say to myself.
Focusing on calming my breathing, I try to listen for the monster. Everything I have been told about monsters leads me to believe that it will keep trying to kill me until it succeeds or dies. I allow myself to briefly wonder why monsters are so bloodthirsty before forcing my focus back to the fight. I scan the trees in front of me and to the side, seeing no message windows appearing that would call out the creature in hiding.
Without the message window to warn me that there is a monster there, I am practically blind in this forest. The perpetual gloom of the forest has only deepened the longer that I have lingered here. In another hour or so it might as well be as dark as a moonless night.
I feel the bark beneath my hand crunch as I press my free hand to its surface. Looking at the tree, I get an idea.
It takes five minutes, but eventually I see the telltale sign of a message window pointing the monster out in the branches of the tree. The Rock Tellemur has circled the long way around, coming in my direction from the front rather than from the sides as I expected. The huge branches of the trees rustle as the monkey-like monster jumps between the leaves, quiet as a mouse, barely giving away anything of its passage. The tellemur takes its time as it winds its way to where it suspects I will be, but when it finally reaches the tree nearest to mine, it finds the snow beneath the tree vacant of easy prey.
My Dragonfire Bolt collides with the back of the monster, the explosion that comes just after the collision blowing one of its arms off as the tellemur tumbles from the tree it was perching on. I smile, hidden away in a branch of my own, a considerable distance up the side of the tree that I had been hiding against. My guess had been spot on, the monster seemed to like hanging around at the fifty-foot mark up the sides of the trees. I just needed to climb a bit higher than that.
I dig the nails of my free hand into the back of the tree branch I perch on, already building up the charge on another Dragonfire Bolt as I look down at the monster in the snow. My boots shake from the strain of holding this crouch behind a few leafy sprigs on the branch for ten minutes, not daring to move an inch. My whole body groans at me with the ache of it, but it seems that the gambit paid off.
Down below, I see the Rock Tellemur shift in the snow, trying to pick itself up. Its limbs move strangely, uncoordinated; it probably hurt its head in the fall. I give my dragonfire ten seconds of charge before I throw it down onto the back of the monster again, setting the tellemur on fire, listening to it scream for a moment from my own perch seventy feet up in my tree.
You have defeated Rock Tellemur
THRESHOLD FOR SOUL REINFORCEMENT REACHED!
“Something to look forward to in the morning,” I say. I find climbing down the tree to be far harder than climbing up it in the first place. It doesn’t help that I am constantly aware of just how dead I will be if I slip and fall out of the tree from so high up. At least, I assume that the fall will kill me. Maybe it won’t anymore.
The tellemur is still smoldering by the time that I make it over to the body. I nudge the corpse with my boot, not wanting to touch it with my hand.
2 silver has been added to inventory
22 copper has been added to inventory
“Just money?” I open my inventory to check, but yes, my disenchantment did only produce money this time. It feels a bit of a letdown after killing the monster had just pushed me over the threshold for soul reinforcement, but I don’t let myself dwell on it for long. Making my way back to where I initially killed the python, I scan the trees for a long moment to try and make certain that no other monsters have crept up on me while I was dealing with the tellemur, none have.
I rub some warmth back into my hands and jump a few times to get my legs warmed up before I take off at a sprint in the direction that I originally intended. The wind chills my face as I run, but I don’t let it bother me too much, summoning more dragonfire to keep myself warm. After running for twenty minutes or so, I finally see something different from the endless trees as light cuts through the dark of the forest.
I come to a stop at the edge of a new tree line, though this one is far different from the parade grounds that I left before. The snow-covered landscape rises out in front of me, an open expanse of snow stretching out for half a mile in a continual rise before changing back into a forest. Looking to the east and west, I don’t find that the clearing goes on forever, but it may as well.
Throughout the clearing around me I spot patches of red in the snow, the fallen bodies of soldiers clad in metal armor and mages laying mostly buried beneath the white. Flags from armies I don’t recognize stand planted in the snow, rising ten or more feet into the air, flickering in the cold wind that wanders through the dead battlefield. I take a step forward, my foot crunching into the snow.
“I wouldn’t go out there,” a voice calls to me from my left.
I freeze, spinning to find a man standing at the edge of the forest not twenty feet away from me, leaning against one of the massive trees. It is the same man that I saw first enter the forest a few hours ago. He wears a blue leather jacket over warm woolen clothing. I notice that the strange wooden rod he had on his hip before is out in his hand, the tip of it glowing a soft blue that leaves smoke behind in the air as he waves it lazily in front of himself.
He points up the sloping snow toward a point on the battlefield that I hadn’t noticed before. What appears to be a set of armor paces back and forth as slow as molasses, dragging behind it a sword as long as the ones that I had seen Halford create with his ability.
Armor of Forgotten Dead
“Thanks for the warning,” I say to the man, taking a step back toward the trees. As far as I can tell, the patrolling suit of armor hasn’t noticed the two of us here at the edge of the forest.
“Merely paying a kindness forward,” he says. “I was honestly surprised that so many others caught on to them lying about the competition being delayed.” The man gazes at me with the coldest blue eyes I have ever seen, the fray of his blonde hair kicking in the air behind him from the winter wind.
“Why would they have tents and food waiting for everyone when they didn’t plan on all of us having to wait another day to start the competition,” I say, coming to understand the thought of it only as I say it. I hope that he can’t hear the uncertainness in my voice. “Today and tonight are also part of the competition.”
“The Passage of Rising Tide involves hundreds of participants. If the events are going to be as open as I predict, then there must be a certain kind of social element to the proceedings,” he says.
“Making alliances,” I say, nodding. “It makes sense.”
“With that understanding,” the man puts his weapon back into the loop of his belt and takes a few steps in my direction, “I believe that I might introduce myself. Hello, my name is Dovik Willian, it is a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
Dovik Willian(Rank One), Son of Grandmaster Harrilis Willian
Immortal Conflux