Hardly a beat passes between Jess killing the first of the monster and a score of the small fish leaping out of the mud at us. As long as my forearm, the scales of the mud piranha make a strange clanking sound as they wriggle through the air, gnarly teeth wide and aimed at our bodies. All of a sudden, the root that I stand on feels too narrow, my perch too precarious, and the monsters flying through the air at me far too fast. I unleash the dragonfire that I am holding onto at one of them, the fire burning through the air, leaving a trail of smoke as it soars to collide with the monster fish in the middle of its leap. A ball of burning orange light expands away when the two meet, an orb of heat and burning two feet across exploding in the middle of the mud-forest.
The charred corpse of a fish falls out of the fireball, two more of the monsters falling along with the first, one side of their green-silver scaled bodies burnt black, cracks of orange embers beneath the scales still smoldering. I smell the burning of my own attack a second later, the very air inside of the explosion having been burned. The two injured piranha fall back into the mud, disappearing as easily as if they were diving into water. I call more dragonfire, ready to look around to anyone else that might need help, when I feel something collide with my chest.
I look down. A piranha thrashes, its teeth clamped and partially embedded into the steel breastplate I am wearing. Tits and honey, if I wasn’t wearing any armor, the thing would be chewing through my collarbone.
Orange fire snakes around my hand as I grab ahold of the fish, spreading out from my fingers to envelope the monster, blackening its shining scales almost instantly. The fish continues to thrash as my fire torches it, wild now, the fear of its own impending death sending it into a panic. It must weigh twenty pounds or more, and its thrashing makes my foot slip. I fall on my ass, the shock racing up my spine, and finally manage to pull the piranha off my armor as I begin to tip over. I flail, falling backwards over the edge of the root, tossing the body of the monster away from myself as my arms pinwheel, looking for anything to latch onto.
My fall stops just before my head splashes into the mud, my naked foot hooking an outcropping on the root. Moist bark begins to splinter under my weight as I dangle upside down. My nails dig into the loose bark of the tree, trying to find any kind of purchase. Gods, I wish I had claws like Jess right now.
She finished her leap away from the tree root she was standing on. Now, she stands on the sandbar, near the chest, spinning her wickedly sharp chakram like a dancer might a ribbon. Dozens of the mud piranha jump out of the mud at her, the strange rattling of their bodies through the air like the sound of a tambourine, only heightening the surrealness of Jess’ grace as she weaves through them, slicing monsters apart midair. She makes it look so easy.
Macille and Samielle fight back-to-back on a root on the far side of the sandbar from me. Macille uses his shield to catch the monsters midflight, sometimes slapping them into the air to be cut apart before they can fall back into the mud. Samielle laughs, several cuts bleeding down his arms from where he has been clipped by the swarming monsters. A piranha leaps up out of the mud at him. Samielle winds up his mace, and with a great swing, sends it sailing far into the trees, dead before it left the flaming head of his mace.
A dagger appears in my hand, looted from the corpses on the slope, and I slam the blade home into the tree root I continue to struggle against. I expect to have more difficulty leveraging myself up, back onto the root, but my strengthened body performs the action fluidly. My hair is tugged as I swing myself up, one of the piranha’s aiming for my head only managing to catch my hair as it sails beneath the tree root. I snarl and pant as I pull myself to my knees astride the root, not daring to try and stand again. I don’t think that I am quite coordinated enough to dance between slippery tree roots in the middle of a fight.
The blue line of mana in my vision begs for me to use it. I oblige. Already, a few of the lower branches are aflame with my orange dragonfire, a remnant from my first attack, and as the monsters continue to swarm us from out of the mud, I add even more. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from my Dragonfire Bolts after all of the levels I gained this morning, but the way that my fire expands on impact and the sheer heat and destructive force, brings a sadistic glee welling up inside of me. I let myself feel it, flinging magic at the leaping monsters, burning them to charred hunks in midair. After all, they are monsters, might as well enjoy it.
The battle isn’t a long one, not nearly as long as the ones that I have grown used to. A strange stillness falls over the forest after a few minutes, the four of us poised and ready for more enemies to come flying out of the muck at us. I continue to sit there, legs straddling the tree root, hand raised and alight. Jess’ chest heaves from her exertion, the sandbar around her filled with the dismembered bodies of dozens of piranha. She hisses a long breath, trying to center herself, and stabs her chakram into the sand at her feet, leaning on it.
“Did we get them?” Samielle asks from across the mud. The man is bleeding from several shallow cuts, rings of teeth marks standing out on his skin, pumping crimson in time with his heart. Macille rests a hand on the man’s shoulder, pushing healing magic into him and causing the wounds to scab over. Samielle is too distracted watching the mud to notice; bubbles continue to pool and pop from something beneath the surface.
“I doubt it,” I say. I let the fire vanish from my fingers before I plant my hands on the root and try to get back to my feet. My thighs are killing me. Before I can ask Galea how many we managed to kill, she is there, holding a window between her golden claws.
You have defeated Mud Piranha(level 19)x20
You have defeated Mud Piranha(level 20)x26
You have defeated Mud Piranha(level 21)x13
THRESHOLD FOR SOUL REINFORCEMENT REACHED!
“Is this right?” I ask Galea. “Only one level.”
“I just report what happens to you, Mistress Charlene.” The dragon spirit collapses the window between her claws, somehow crumpling it up and dispersing it with a breath of her own dragonfire.
At this point, I am about over trying to figure out how to predict levels.
“Fish!” Jess calls out into the forest, banging her chakram against the top of the chest she stands near, sending up a horrible clanking noise. “Yummy lady here! Come and get me!”
I look at Macille, expecting him to be angry at the flagrant taunting of monster, but find him looking more disappointed if anything. “Hopefully this wasn’t a waste of time,” he says.
“I’m sure it wasn’t,” I say. I make sure that my feet don’t slip out from under me again as I leap from my root down to the sandbar, landing next to Jess. In the middle of the muddy clearing, I can feel the air distinctly warmer. There are patches of mud that smolder with orange fire still, the mud there baked and hard. I look around at the spots of fire floating on top of the mud, more than a little impressed with myself.
“Yeah,” Jess says, thunking the chest again with her chakram, ringing the air. “We got this after all.”
“Well,” Samielle says, “what’s in it?”
Jess plants her chakram in the sand and kicks the top of the chest, flipping the lid open. My eyes bulge at the sheer wealth that glitters inside the chest. There must be hundreds of silver pieces stacked inside the iron chest, haphazard coins piled in a way that catches the light coming down through the canopy.
“Junk,” Jess says, spitting into the mud.
“What!” I shriek at her. “That’s silver!” I realize that I might be overreacting a second later but refuse to feel any embarrassment over it. How can she call money junk?
“How is that helpful to me?” Jess demands, turning on me, angrier than I would have expected.
“Yikes,” I hear Samielle comment up in his tree.
“Ladies,” Macille says as his boots splash into the sand on the opposite side of the chest. “Let’s keep things civil.”
“I wasn’t aware I was being uncivil,” I say. I move past Jess and look down into the chest, picking up one of the coins and turning it over in my fingers. “This is real.”
“Maybe there is something more useful inside,” Macille ventures.
“Maybe,” I agree. I rap my fingers along the top of the chest, making it disappear into my inventory.
“You did not just steal all of that!” Jess says, stalking toward me.
I retreat from the woman, scared at the sudden anger that has come over her. “No,” I tell her, putting Macille between me and her. I’m sure he appreciates it. “It’s just faster to look though this way.”
“Jess!” Macille barks, making her stop. “Get a hold of yourself.”
It takes a good thirty seconds before I see the tension start to loose out of the woman’s shoulders. She exhales a long breath. “You’re right,” she says, rubbing her neck. “Sorry. It’s just…never mind.”
“Apology accepted,” I say, uncertain if it is right to even acknowledge. I glance sideways, opening the window that displays my inventory, seeing a spot in my inventory taken up by a chest. My eyes scan over the numbers at the top of the window indicating the coin in my possession, and my mouth falls open.
“What,” Macille says, looking at me concerned.
I grab the man’s shoulder, my hands shaking. “Twelve-hundred silver pieces,” I say to him. “That chest held twelve hundred pieces of silver. Do you have any idea what I could buy with that? That is almost as much money as my family’s orchard is worth!”
“Well,” Samielle says, finally joining us on the sandbar, “you will need to cut that number in four., That’s…” The man starts looking down at his fingers.
“Three hundred silver pieces,” Jess says. “Three hundred a piece.”
“Right,” I agree, nodding. “Wait a moment.” I take a second to look around the forest, hoping that I might be able to see anyone spying on us if I just look for them. Of course, I know that anyone from the Willian guild watching us would likely be undetectable to a rank one, but looking can’t hurt.
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“Don’t tell anyone I have this,” I say, pulling a blank journal and a piece of charcoal from my inventory. They are just two of the items I smuggles out of Arabella’s flying mansion the night before the Passage began. I scrawl everyone’s names onto the first page, noting the amount of silver that I owe each of them, and showing them all the page. “There. This way we can keep track of what I am carrying for everyone.”
“It is like you expect to be carrying a lot of things,” Macille comments.
“I do,” I say. I motion to the vacant spot in the sand, shaped like a rectangle, where the chest had just been. “I’m hoping that we can find some more of those. If I could leave this competition with enough money to buy my own flying mansion, well I just think that might be a great way to start my life as a magician.”
“Forget the money,” Jess says. “Was there anything actually useful in the chest?”
I look back at my inventory. “Two things,” I say. I reach into the inventory window and dig both my hands into the newly filled spaces, pulling out the magical items. One is a pair of gloves, red and glittering, appearing to be made of fish scales. The other is a long, thin dagger that catches sunlight on the blade, turning it into a rainbow cascade of colors.
Gloves of the Red Myrmidon(Rare):
Gloves made from the scales of a Red Myrmidon, crafted by the master crafter Julias Ao’Ra. These gloves contain the natural energies of the Red Myrmidon, allowing the wearer to breath under water for a short period of time.
Enhancement: +15 Magic, +15 Magic Defense
Tickler’s Promise(Rare):
A blade bathed in the deadly oils produced by a vile swamp. The poisonous mana that infects the blade continues to linger, causing wounds delivered by this blade to inflict a lingering and debilitating poison.
I hold up the items for the group’s inspection. “Magic gloves and a poison dagger,” I say.
Samielle scoffs and turns away, flapping his way back up onto a tree root. Jess leans in, inspecting the gloves. “What kind of magic gloves?” she asks.
“They make you better at magic and increase your defense against magic,” I tell her.
“I guess it’s obvious who gets those then,” Macille says, smiling at me.
“I would like the defense against magic,” Jess adds. She looks up at me, picking her chakram up out of the sand. “You are the mage though, so those go to you.”
“Really?” I run a thumb over the scales of the gloves. They feel like touching an ice-cold snake, the sensation of the cool metal beneath my fingers soothing.
“Unless you don’t want them,” Jess says.
“No.” Without waiting further, I hand the dagger to Macille and slip one of the gloves over my left hand. The sensation of the cool metal sends a shiver down my spine, but I can feel the magic start circulating through my body as soon as I have them both on. I bring up the window showing my attributes to check it.
Charlene Devardem
Human(Level 19)(Rank 1)
Emperor Conflux
Attributes
Vitality: 34
Strength: 23
Magic: 171(186)
Defense: 31
Magic Defense: 26(41)
Speed: 100
Recovery: 138
Perception: 24
Presence: 0
Healing Points: 340
Mana: 1860
Stamina: 544
I flex my fingers inside the gloves. “These are nice.”
“Does anyone want this dagger?” Macille asks, looking between the two of us.
“I think I found another chest!” Samielle calls from the trees.
“Wait for us!” Macille yells back at him.
A few seconds later, we can all hear swearing coming from somewhere else in the forest and the sound of mud piranhas’ chittering scales as they fly through the air. Macille sighs.
“I don’t think I need it,” I tell him, ignoring Samielle.
“I already have a weapon,” Jess says. “Hold onto it for now.” She turns, leaping into the trees to run toward the battle.
“I would rather not hold onto a poison dagger without a sheath,” Macille says, handing the weapon back to me handle first.
“Probably a good idea,” I admit. I make the blade disappear back into my inventory. When Arabella had first given me the storage ring, I have to admit that I was a little bit disappointed. After how much I have been using it the last few days, I would kick my older self for not seeing how incredibly useful it was right away. “We should probably go help them with the fight.”
“Yeah,” Macille says. He approaches the edge of the sandbar and readies himself to jump up onto the roots before turning back and looking at me. “You have something, just there,” he says, brushing his chest.
I look down, seeing the head of a piranha attached to the front of my breastplate, its needle-like teeth digging into the metal as it stares up at me with dead fishy eyes. “I…know,” I say. “I left it there on purpose.”
“Right.” Macille smirks at me before he jumps up off the sandbar toward a root, gaining much greater height than I thought a man wearing as much armor as he does should be able to. His strength must be incredibly high. I wonder if he has hit the first threshold for it.
As subtly as I can manage, I rip the dead fish head off my armor and chuck it into the mud. Why did no one say anything?
The fight against the next swarm of piranha is far less eventful than the first. Understanding that slippery tree roots are in fact slippery, I do my best to focus on not falling on my ass like an idiot and taking a dip in the mud. I can only imagine how horribly things might go for me if I fell in.
By the time that we have ended the lives of all the monster spewing up out of the mud to tear at us with their horrible teeth, another circle of mud is left burning with loose ribbons of orange fire. The sandbar in the middle of the open area is twice as big as the previous, and the chest resting in its center is filigreed with gold. The chest itself is probably worth as much as a small house back home.
Jess gnaws on the flambeed corpse of one of the mud piranhas as I tentatively try to put my weight on one of the burning patches of mud. A disk of dried and hard mud shifts beneath the weight of my foot, sliding away, and almost capsizing from my weight. There goes my idea of making a walking path across the mud with my fire. Maybe when my magic hits the first threshold, I might be able to pull something off like that.
“These aren’t bad,” Jess comments, biting the head off the cooked monster in her hands.
“Gross,” Samielle comments. The man is bleeding again, but despite his wounds, he seems in a good mood. The man peels open the chest, revealing more silver coins inside. Unlike the last time, I can see that he is starting to appreciate the mountain of wealth inside. “Let’s find another one.”
“I agree,” I say, stepping up and making the chest disappear into my inventory. Despite its size and contents, the chest only takes up a single space in my inventory. I will have to see how I can use that later to make storing things easier.
We spend a good three hours afterward moving through the trees, looking for obvious chests among the mud-forest, finding plenty. It never once occurs to us to go back to the larger group and try to bring others. We are having far too much fun tearing through hordes of mud piranha and opening heavy metal chests.
The monsters never seem to get any stronger, despite the contents of some of the chests being incredibly good. By the end of the third hour, we are tearing through the flying fish with the proficiency of a real adventurer team. The only time that I feel any real danger is when one of the flying fish knocks into me from behind, knocking me off the root I am standing on and into the mud. Luckily, I manage to land halfway onto the sandbar, but in that few seconds of my legs dangling in the mud, six of the nibbling fish monsters manage to latch themselves to my legs.
Macille heals the plethora of bite marks after I drag myself out of the mud. After that, I am far more liberal with my application of fire magic to the mud piranhas.
Samielle makes out with the most equipment, an ax that gives off an ice aura that he begins to wield in his other hand, using two weapons for the last hour of fighting, a horned helmet that slowly heals his injuries, and boots that let him walk on the mud like it were solid ground. Macille gets a helmet of his own that boosts his defense against magic and a silver breastplate that weighs practically nothing and magically empowers his defense. Jess gets a pink ribbon that rests on her shoulders, increasing her speed and precision. I get another breastplate identical to the one we give Macille, though mine is a bit smaller and obviously made with a woman’s proportions in mind, the first time I have seen armor made that way.
The considerable bonus to my Defense attribute is well appreciated. Maybe with the new armor, monsters will stop tearing through me like butter.
“Well,” Macille says, looking up at the sky through the trees, “that’s about it for me.”
“What?” I ask.
He looks at me, a bit concerned. “My magic is just about out. I think it’s time to call it a day.”
“Same here,” Samielle adds. The man’s skin is practically coated in his own dried blood by this point. Every time I ask him why he won’t wear any armor he just shrugs me off.
“It has been a good day of fighting,” Jess agrees.
I check my own vital energies, finding them all nearly full. “I want to keep going,” I tell them.
“Never took you for a battle fanatic,” Jess says, punching me in the shoulder. “Good.”
“Not good,” Macille says, standing. “When the group is at its limit, it is best to not push our luck. You have been throwing fire around all day. I am sure that you are near your limit.”
“Honestly, no,” I tell him. I check my mana once more, 1610/1860. “I am still in top condition.”
Macille strokes his chin, judging me. “You are human,” he murmurs, as if that explains it.
It is just then that I realize that I have never shared with Macille the fact that I am a Recovery specialist. Actually, this is the first time that my having a heightened Recovery attribute has ever come up and been of benefit.
“Don’t stay too long,” Samielle says, leaping toward a tree root. “I bet these fish get far more dangerous when there isn’t any light to see by.”
“We aren’t leaving her here,” Macille calls to him.
“She will be fine,” Jess says, patting my shoulder. “You’ve seen her fire. Charlene is scary good at frying fish.”
Macille looks at me, frowning. “It would be a bad idea to stay,” he tells me.
“I think you know that I won’t try to take any kind of fight that I can’t win,” I tell him. “However, I think I can handle these fish on my own.”
It isn’t a bluff. Over the last few hours of fighting, I have gotten a handle on how these monsters operate. They are incredibly simple creatures, jumping in straight lines out of the mud to try and snap at me up on the tree roots. Additionally, I have started to realize that they aren’t faster than me, like I initially thought. My Speed attribute is over 100 now, when I am truly focused, these simple monsters cannot touch me.
“My gut tells me not to leave you here,” Macille says.
“So why will you anyway?” I ask him.
He exhales a long breath, walking to the edge of the sandbar. “Because you are a magician. I won’t disrespect you by telling you what your limits are. You know them better than I do.”
“Thanks,” I tell him. “Really. I’ll be fine, and if I come across something that I don’t think I can handle, I’ll run away. I’m sure that I am faster than these monsters now. They won’t be able to catch me.”
“I will hold you to that,” Macille says, leaping up to a tree root.
Jess knocks me on the shoulder as she passes, a big smile on her face. “Don’t stay out here too long, farm girl.”
“Why are you calling me that?” I ask her.
She shrugs. “Dovik calls you that.”
“Is that going to be my name now?”
Jess doesn’t answer, backflipping eight feet up onto one of the roots and joining Macille in looking down at me. The two disappear along with Samielle into the trees, no doubt heading South, back toward the encampment to inform everyone what we found here. I take a few moments to center myself, stretching out my arms and shoulders before I scramble back up onto the tree roots suspended above the dangerous mud.
This is the first real time that my being a Recovery Specialist has ever given me a leg up on anyone else. I had never thought to use it to try and outlast other people in my own group at my ability to continue fighting while they grow tired. Halford’s words wing in my head, telling me that in order to catch up to these elite magicians, I will have to work harder than they do. It only occurs to me now what that will look like.
“Let’s fry some fish,” I say, heading off into the forest, looking for more treasure and combat.