“Well,” I say, shading my eyes with my hand. “That certainly is interesting.”

Just in front of our group of four, the crystal water of a small lake laps against the pebbly shore. Out in the middle of the oval-shaped lake rests a small island of trees far shorter than the ones that make up the rest of the forest. A six-hundred-foot distance of knee-high water separates us from the small island. I look left, spotting Jess palming a handful of the pure water and sniffing it before licking it up out of her hand.

Jess Keller(Rank One)(Level 41)

Blade Dancer Conflux

Despite my offering the day of the battle, Jess refuses to take any metal armor, saying that it would weigh her down. All of that had happened, all the killing and dying, only yesterday. Gods, it feels like so much longer ago.

“So,” I ask, “is it poisoned?”

Jess wipes her hand on her scaly leg and stands. “No,” she says. The woman starts wading out into the water, the huge chakram on her hip cutting a line through the water as she splashes forward.

“Hold on,” Macille shouts, stopping me from taking my own step to follow her. We look back at him. “We aren’t even going to talk about whether we should go to that island or not?”

“I got you because you said you were interested in investigating,” Samielle says, standing on the shore next to Macille. The man has forgone chest armor, even any clothing at all to cover his chest, opting to show off his rather impressive physique, armoring his arms and legs with what I gathered on the slope. The heavy coat the man usually wears is folded neatly and discarded on a flat rock nearby.

Samielle Kraesh(Rank One)(Level 29)

Nightmare Conflux

It is only when I tear my eyes away from ogling the man’s muscles, that I realize the area around the lake is far warmer than the rest of the forest. If I didn’t know any better, I would think it was spring. The fringed edges of the canopy I can see far across on the other shore of the lake aren’t even tinged with snow today. I make my own coat and Dire Bear skin disappear into my inventory.

“Investigate, sure.” Macille points to the island in the middle of the lake. “I didn’t say that I was comfortable with charging headfirst into whatever kind of danger is waiting for us on that island.”

“You’re just guessing that it’s monsters over there,” I say. With a thought, I make my boots disappear, and step barefoot into the water. The crystal water is warm.

“What else would it be?” Macille asks, still shying away from the water. “Isn’t this entire passage that we are taking part in about fighting monsters?”

“I thought it was about making it to the other side of the forest,” Jess says from further into the lake. She is twenty feet away from me now, walking backwards, smirking. Despite the distance, it doesn’t seem as if the water has gotten any deeper for her.

Back on the shore, Samielle stretches out the wings extending off his back and I can hear several pops as he adjusts himself. The way that he rolls his shoulders, all the muscles beneath flexing as he spreads out his wings, well…it stops me in my own tracks. Damn, I wish I had wings like that.

He and Macille begin a small argument while I lose myself in thought, soothing water rising and falling with the lake’s tide against my legs. When I least expect it, I am finding myself more and more envious of the abilities other people have. Part of it might be my low level, since awakening to the ability this morning, I have been greeted once again with just how much stronger everyone else is than me. Add to that, there are people like Samielle who were lucky enough to have gained the ability to fly from their essentia. I wonder if that muscular body of his also came from his abilities or if he worked to obtain it on his own.

I turn a little to see Jess still pacing away. She waves to me as I look at her before she stops for a moment. With utmost grace, the woman’s tail lashes out and spears into the water. She raises a fish out of the water, speared on the end of her tail, and claps her hands together, gesturing at me to make certain that I saw her movements. Someone is going to love that woman; I am sure of it.

Macille, well, what can I not notice about him. He and his brother are the most built elves that I have ever seen, and considering that I grew up in Gale, that is many. Add to that that his abilities are incredibly well-rounded, he is smart, resilient, trustworthy, and dependable. Not to even mention that he would be beautiful even among the already beautiful elves. I look at my reflection in the water beneath me. What do I have that any of them don’t? I guess I’m…tall?

“What are you thinking about?” I hear Macille call me from the shore.

“Wondering what my Regalia will be,” I tell him, crouching to inspect my face better in the water. When I take the time to look, it still catches me off guard how different I look now. My skin is clear, the pores that were once clogged with black heads have now almost disappeared. I hardly recognize the woman that stares up at me, her eyes are so foreign, but I have to admit that Halford was right; I can see my mother in her face.

“Regalia usually has to do with your Conflux,” Jess says. I hear her splash through the water over to me. “Mine will probably be blade arms, like my mother and aunt.”

“Blade arms!” I look up at Jess, silently taking the fish she hands to me and putting it into my inventory.

Jess motions to her forearms. “My mother’s Regalia are here, like swords always attached to her arms, incredibly sharp. She and my aunt have the same Conflux as me, so I will probably get that as well when I reach the third rank.”

“Based on Conflux huh,” I gaze back into the water. “My brother made it past the third rank, but I’m pretty sure we don’t have the same Conflux. I also have no idea what his Regalia is.”

“Is this important right now?” Macille asks. “It’s fun to talk about sure, but…”

“I’ve only ever seen one other person with the same Conflux as me,” Samielle cuts in. “He had these eyes that were completely black and a third one in the middle of his forehead. When he looked at you, it was like he was looking into your soul.” Samielle shivers. “I imagine that I will get something like that.”

Macille sighs and shakes his head. The lot of us turn to him with expectant looks on our faces. Macille rubs the bridge of his nose and snorts a laugh. “I don’t know. I have a pretty basic Conflux, Guardian if anyone is interested. I imagine that I might get metal skin or something. A bit lame.”

“I think you would look good with metal skin,” I tell him. It only strikes me after how strange that sentence is. I look back down at the girl in the water. She is too pretty to really be me. “I want the treasure.”

“As a Regalia?” Jess asks.

“No.” I point to the island not too far away. “That dickhead Gaius implied that there was treasure to be found in the forest. If the Willian guild went around putting treasure in the forest for us to find, that would be a good place for it I think.”

“He might have implied it,” Macille says, “but I don’t think that man is all that reliable.”

“Maybe not,” I say, shrugging and standing. “Actually, no, he definitely isn’t reliable. Anyone that dresses up like a betrayer god cannot be reliable. Still, I bet there is treasure on that island.”

“An ability speaking to you?” Macille asks.

“No, well maybe. If my essentia were going to point me toward anything, I would think that it would be treasure.” Thinking about my own essentia, that just makes sense.

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“I already wanted to check it out,” Samielle says.

“Same,” Jess says.

Macille sighs, shaking his head again, and wades out into the water. “Alright,” he says. “But let’s not end up regretting this.”

“Why would we possibly regret approaching a mysterious island that could hold any number of powerful monsters?” I ask. Macille doesn’t seem amused by the question the same way I am.

The lakebed of rocks that shift on the silt bed beneath out feet stays shallow for the entirety of the journey to the island. Lake fish swim in loose schools close to the surface of the water, probing at us every now and then, swimming away at the barest touch. There are holes in the floor of the lake, huge circular openings that descend into darkness far past our vision. We skirt around them.

The closer we come to the island in the middle of the lake, the stranger it begins to be. I realize as I approach that there is not really any land on the island. Trees with roots climbing up out of the water form a spiderweb of stability just a few feet above a bed of mud the color of clay. A short wall of smooth river stones surrounds the strange forest, keeping the mud isolated to the trees. We stop just outside of the wall of stones, the red mud on the other side of the barrier bubbling in spots.

Samielle lands on one of the large tree roots suspended above the mud. He drops a stone down into the mud, watching it disappear as if it were splashing into water. “Quicksand,” he says, looking back at the rest of us.

“Gross,” Jess replies. The woman jumps clear out of the water, stabbing her fingers into the back of the one of the sad looking trees, and landing on another of the dry roots.

“Never mind,” I say, looking at the bubbling mud. “I don’t want to go in there anymore.”

“Afraid of a little quicksand?” Macille asks me. The man looks around, trying to find a suitable spot to climb up onto a root himself.

“I don’t even know what that is,” I say. “I know that I hate mud though.”

Macille isn’t even listening to me. He steps up onto the wall of rocks surrounding the island of mud and leaps to a root, landing gracefully on it. “There is a lot of water to wash it off yourself later,” he says, gesturing out to the lake.

“Remember the treasure,” Jess adds, trying to reassure me.

“I just had to open my stupid mouth,” I mutter, going for the same route Macille did. Landing on the root, I feel it give a little beneath my and Macille’s combined weight. He grabs my hand to help me not fall off. I make my way to a different root.

“Well,” Samielle asks. “Now what?”

“Dovik wanted to know what the rest of the forest looked like,” Macille says. “To make sure that everything is scouted before we make any big moves as a group.”

“Into the trees then,” I say.

“Into the trees,” Macille agrees.

The roots of the trees groan as I walk along the top of them. I continue along barefooted, afraid that trying to rely on metal greaves might make me lose my balance. There is no sound inside of the trees, just the quiet echo and groan of wood stretching. Samielle finds himself grounded and hopping across roots alongside us, the forest too dense for him to fly inside of. Jess, of course, makes the going look trivial, her clawed feet dancing across the roots like they were a roadway.

She is the first one to see it when we come across it. Six minutes after entering the island-forest, Jess calls back to us to stop our hopping between the trees. We pause, looking where she points. I don’t think that I am the only one left a bit confused by what we see.

“It’s…a chest,” I say. I skip across a few roots, approaching the mound of sand in the middle of the bubbling mud. The trees have been cleared away from a five-foot mound of dry land in the middle of the swamp, and on top of the sandbar rests a chest of solid iron, 2 feet long and about half as wide.

“Hold it!” Macille shouts at me, making me stop just as I was about to hop down onto the sandbar. I look back at him, spotting Jess just a few feet away from myself and about to do the same thing. “That is an obvious trap.”

“Oh,” I say, scooting back toward the trunk of the tree whose root I am standing on and leaning against it. “Now that you say it, it does seem a little trappy.”

“You would have to be a pretty big bastard to put a treasure chest in the middle of a mud swamp and turn it into a trap,” Jess comments. Realizing that we are all looking at her, she adds, “I’m not saying that it isn’t a trap. Just felt like calling that Gaius guy a bastard is all.”

“Surely he cannot be the only person in the Willian guild who is working on this trial,” Samielle says.

“He is a fourth ranker,” I say.

“That doesn’t make him omnipotent,” Samielle says back to me. “There must be dozens of people working to ruin our lives. This ‘Passage’ is supposed to take place over hundreds of miles. I can’t imagine how many high rankers they must need to monitor all of us for that.”

I shrug at him. “I’ve seen fourth rankers lift entire buildings and fly them hundreds of miles. Tits and honey, that man made a huge magic wall that stretched hundreds of feet high and probably a hundred miles long. What couldn’t they do? Keeping track of a bunch of kids seems like it should be child’s play next to all of that.” Then again, that alchemist woman summoned potions from outside and nobody came descending from the heavens to remove her from the Passage.

“I’m not a kid,” Samielle says, huffing.

“Yeah,” Jess agrees.

“I think we are getting a little bit sidetracked,” Macille says. “Again.” He points to the chest in the middle of the sandbar. “What are we going to do about that?”

“I heard that getting sidetracked means that you have a team which works well together,” Jess says.

“No,” Macille says, cutting off my witty reply to Jess before I can get started. “The chest, what do we do about it?”

“Well, we came for treasure,” I say, bringing dragonfire to my hand. “I say we open it.”

“Seconded,” Samielle says. He pops his neck and stretches the stiffness out of his shoulders. “No time like the present.”

Macille shakes his head. “Who opens it then?”

“Sammy can fly,” I say.

“Don’t call me that.”

“I’m still faster than him though,” Jess says.

“Higher level too,” I add.

“What?”

“Forget about it.”

“Jess can open it if she really wants to,” Samielle says, motioning toward the lizardkin woman. The tone of his voice drips with his own desire to crack open the chest.

Jess preens. “I will then.”

As she readies herself, squatting on the branch she stands on, coiling her legs to spring over to the sandbar, Macille cuts in again. “We still need to buff up.”

Jess groans up at the sky, which given the closeness of the forest, is just a few branches above her. “Yes,” she says. “Let’s make sure to be safe.”

I can feel myself picking up bad habits from these two. Their anxious energy to get to the action is infectious.

Macille lifts a glowing palm, throwing a wave of magic against all of us, applying his Guardian’s Bulwark too each of us. Though, given that Jess doesn’t wear armor, I doubt it will be very beneficial to her. She surprises me by removing a horn from the leather belt she hangs her chakram on and showing it off. The horn is made of ivory and filigreed with platinum. My eye detects white mana enshrouding it, a very dense aura.

“I found this on the slope after all the fighting was done,” she says. “I knew something this nice was worth its weight in gold. Shai’garrow’s bones, I didn’t know the half of it.” She brings the horn to her lips, and with a deep inhale, blows it for all its worth. A wave of white light explodes away from the horn in her hand, washing over all of us, and settling upon our skin.

Horn of Impending Victory(Very Rare):

A horn made from the carved remains of a Phantom Torcher. Hunted for its extreme rarity and the powerful natural treasures that constitute their beings, this horn has the ability to bolster all allies who hear its call to battle.

Power: Sound of Glory

Sound of Glory

The sound of impending battle and victory invigorates you. For the next ten minutes, all attributes are increased by 10%.

I feel the raw power from the spell settling into my skin like an itch to charge into battle. I whoop, bouncing on my toes, rocking the tree root that I stand on. My own cheer is echoed by Samielle, but both are drowned out by the echoing call of the horn that rings off into the trees around us. I find Macille cringing when I look over to him.

Before I can ask what’s wrong with him, Jess stands from her crouch and jumps three feet in the air, preparing to spring forward. “Let’s go!” she calls as she lands.

Just as she is about to leap forward toward the sandbar and the big iron chest resting atop it, something splashes up out of the mud. Like an arrow, a blur streaks toward Jess faster than my eye can see. Faster even than that, Jess’ hand lashes out, the claws on the tip of her fingers spearing straight through the small monster trying to bite into her face. The fish, impaled on three of Jess’ fingers, continues to writhe for a moment before falling still, dead.

Mud Piranha(Level 20)

“Ah,” I say, looking down into the mud that is now boiling with movement and bubbles. “Yes, this was probably a trap.”