Mia had never really considered herself the outdoorsy type. She liked hiking once in a while and enjoyed beautiful natural scenery, but she didn’t usually go out of her way to get out there just by herself to relax and unwind like some people did.
Sure, she preferred to do her exercises out in the open air and under the sun, but she didn’t like camping, fishing or one of those very ‘out there’ sports like kayaking or such.
The moment she stepped into the forest north of Graz, she knew that would change. There was an indescribable sense of serenity and satisfaction that overcame her with the greenery surrounding her from all sides.
If only she had the time to enjoy it, and the solitude to do so to the fullest. Alas, she had company, and while she didn’t particularly mind Carmilla being there, that courtesy didn’t extend to the five stomping, thrumming buffoons making up the rest of her impromptu group.
The Sergeant was still fuming. Gwen seemed conflicted about who she should be shouting at, so she settled for silently glaring at everyone while Dumb and Dumber were slowly regaining their previous confidence from only God knew where. Meaning Mia caught them stealing glances at her and Carmilla from their place at the rear of the group.
Meatshields, Mia. Let the meatshields live to serve their purpose. You promised to be careful.
Last but not least the driver, who also turned out to be the reason Mia was still bothering with having the bunch tag along. His name was apparently Friedrich, or Fred, for anyone who didn’t want to twist their tongue into a knot every time they said his name. He was the one with the ‘Assessment’ skill that let him know the level of anything he set his eyes on.
He was also the only one out of their lot Mia thought was at least tolerable.
The surrounding forest had a normalcy to it. It lacked that ominous darkness that seemed to encapsulate the woods in which the werewolf and its beastkin lackeys now lived. Birds chirped, singing happily through the canopy, insects buzzed about and the soft humming of the leaves swaying in the wind all came together to make up the song of the forest.
Mia smiled, the sound relaxing her nerves. In here, if she ignored the soldiers, she felt like nothing had changed, that she was back to being just Mia the coder and not Mia the Arcane Mage.
The deeper in they went though, the more numerous some strange little details got that were not at all in line with what a normal forest should be like.
A moss that crawled up the side of an ancient oak was the first such thing Mia noted, and though it was weird she dismissed it since it didn’t feel wrong.
After it came oversized mushrooms, some being chanterelle or the red-capped ones. Some were the size of a fist, some the size of Mia’s head and some had trunks thicker than most trees around.
Mia stared at one of the latter, a titanic mushroom whose flat brown top brushed against the lowest branches of an ancient oak. Mia could have stood on Carmilla’s shoulders and even then wouldn’t have reached the underside of the mushroom’s cap.
Amazing. She thought. It was like hiking through a forest but with surprises around every corner.
With no monsters in sight, or in Spirit Sense range, Mia looked around without fear. Her footfalls were dimmer than the soldiers, her soles naturally finding solid ground that didn’t make overly loud noises when stepped on. Carmilla, though, was dead silent, passing through the forest like a wraith. No sound, no hesitation in her steps and no apparent focus being put towards doing so.
I guess while I’m technically a half-fae who should have some affinity for the forest; she is the apex predator of the woods.
Mia was so distracted, so absorbed in just watching how Carmilla walked and trying to mimic her movements that she didn’t even notice the danger approaching. She heard the sounds, the dim thud of a pair of padded feet launching off of the branches up above, but she ignored them as non-threatening. After all, her Spirit Sense was silent, blissful even, as it took a soak in the forest’s natural energies. It didn’t feel even a smidge of the bowel clenching wrongness of the strange energy monsters radiated.
Carmilla moved in a flash, her hand clad in her cropped leather jacket, snapping out and grabbing the assailant. Mia stumbled, freezing up at the sudden movement. The ball of orange fur in Carmilla’s iron grip that Mia only seconds later recognised as a fox hissed, twisting its head this way and that to chomp down on the vampiress’ wrist with little success.
“What level is this thing?” Carmilla asked, nonchalant even as the fox writhed in her grasp. It wasn’t large either, only as long as Mia’s arm from snout to the tip of its fluffy tail.
“Ah, that seems to be … three,” Fred said, his eyes glowing with a strange light for a moment. “I’d heard normal animals got levels and Classes too, but this is the first actual one I’m seeing … unless it’s a monster I guess?”
“It’s not,” Mia said, swallowing a lump in her throat before throwing a grateful glance at Carmilla. “Though it acts like it, I’m pretty sure not even rabid foxes act like … that.”
“You can tell?” Fred asked, suddenly looking curious.
“That it’s not a monster? Yes,” Mia said. “As would every single person who got pointy ears like me. Monsters feel nasty, like someone is vomiting down my throat, just with my … spirit? Sort of.”
“I think this thing was a monster,” Carmilla said, shaking the fox a bit like a plush toy which made the animal writhe even more and let out angry yipping barks. “You said monsters can turn into regular magical creatures if they eat enough mana-dense flesh, right?”
“I did,” Mia said, stepping closer to the animal, only to jump back when it tried to claw at her with far too large claws for a fox. “I suppose that wouldn’t change their behaviour overly much, even if they don’t have a short expiration date anymore. So, what do you want to do with it?”
“I don’t need it,” Carmilla said, shrugging, and after Mia mirrored the action grabbed the fox and twisted its neck. The animal went limp with a sickening crunch, after which Carmilla threw the thing away like a piece of garbage. “You said these don’t have cores, right?”
“Yeah,” Mia said, that crunch still echoing in her ears. She shook her head, forcing herself back into focus. “Neither do we, for that matter. Magical creatures too only have energy pools like us. For that thing you killed, its core supposedly turned into that pool of energy.”
“Could have made some good gloves out of that thing,” Fred said, then shrugged. “Anyway! Let us continue! We still have hours until sundown.”
The two girls agreed, though after this encounter, the two placed even less trust into the soldier’s ability to keep them safe. None of them could even react to a mere level three animal’s ambush after all.
That might have made Mia a bit of a hypocrite, since she was the one who almost got nibbled on and likewise failed to notice the animal, but she quickly remedied that. Now that she listened, and didn’t let her preconceptions and her blissful Spirit Sense fool her, she caught the larger animals laying in wait around the forest.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
A stray cat under a fern, eying a nearby rat, another fox ready to pounce out of its burrow and bite down on the neck of a deer and so on and so forth. Arcane Bolts tore through thin branches and pierced a hole into the canopy, sending the broken remains of their latest would-be ambusher falling to the ground.
It landed with a soft thud and Mia studied it for a moment, taking in the clump of feathers, the large curved beak and a beady eye. An owl. Well, what remained of it after it caught the equivalent of a supersonic magical brick to the face.
“Poor thing,” Gwen murmured, and while Mia could understand the feeling, she clearly heard how its claws tightened on the branch, readying for a dive at her face.
Things that wanted to kill her would be killed in turn. That was the way of this new Earth they now lived on. Sucks to be a level four owl in it, I guess, but you maybe shouldn’t have attacked a level ten Halvyr. That was just natural selection in action.
Mia missed the next ambush, much to her embarrassment. Some burrowing thing had made a pitfall trap of all things right under a game trail. If Carmilla had been even a second late to pull Mia back, she’d have needed to pry carved wooden spikes out of her foot.
Spikes that stank, and by the looks of it were covered in manure.
“Do you know what made that?” Mia asked, her voice halfway between livid and fearful.
“Smells like a mole,” Carmilla said after sniffing the air. “I think it’d be best if you weren’t at the head of the group, Mia.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Mia said, grimacing as she looked down. She’d insisted, saying the swaying heads of the soldiers before her were getting in the way of her aim. Who the fuck showed Vietkong trap-making tutorials to the damned moles? “After you.”
Dumb and Dumber stepped forward, looking sour as they passed by the pitfall. They probably guessed Carmilla wouldn’t be bothering with pulling them out of the way at the last moment if they stepped in one and rightly so.
“We should be getting close,” the Sergeant said in a serious voice that made everyone straighten up. “I’m going to repeat for the civvies since you might not have bothered to read the mission briefing. Our task here is to track down what eyewitnesses said is a brown bear and kill it. It should make its home somewhere around here if the trackers are to be believed … “
The Sergeant trailed off, his eyes locked onto a tree right next to the trail they’d been following for the last hour. Mia paid him little mind, already having been staring at the old pine with its bark torn off for a while, trying to guess how large of a paw an animal had to have to make marks that large and deep.
“Carmilla?” Mia asked, sending a glance with a hint of worry to the vampiress. “What do you think?”
“About?” Carmilla asked, head tilted slightly as she squinted at the tree.
“Do you think it’s really a bear? Can you track it?” Mia asked, whispering as the soldiers went about looking at the tree from close up and looking around the undergrowth. Probably for paw prints or droppings, if Mia’s late night binge watching of wilderness survival videos had taught her anything.
“Could be,” Carmilla said. “I never smelled a bear before, so I couldn’t tell for sure, but it feels a little … off.”
“Right,” Mia said, keeping her ears alert. She almost expected to hear the roar of a bear any moment, or perhaps the heavy thuds of its approaching charge, or trees getting knocked over in the distance. Instead, only the forest’s serene song caressed her ears. “I know brown bears are supposed to be huge, but not that huge, no?”
“They are alway larger in person,” the Sergeant said. “Larger than you expect. Just because most things went to shit and the world turned on its head, a bear is still a bear. I was expecting a large dog to be honest, but the claw marks, the footprints … it fits. We have a brown bear in these woods and we are now on its turf.”
“That’s a big fucking bear Sarge,” Dumb said, kneeling on the ground and pushing away some fallen leaves. “You sure our guns will be enough to down it?”
“I am,” the Sergeant said. “But apparently Colonel Zeigler was not, which is why we have these two tagging along.”
Right. Totally not because we asked to tag along on a mission he thought we might stumble across a level ten monster. Wait … did the Quest specify that my target had to be a monster?
Mia hurriedly pulled up the window and had to suppress the urge to curse. It really did specify that her dueled foe had to be a monster. Now she really hoped this wasn’t just some random bear on magical steroids. If it wasn’t a monster, this entire day had been a waste of time.
I’ll get to test my new spells at least. She consoled herself, thinking of the two new spells she had yet to try on a live target.
Like she probably should have done hours ago, Mia quickly summoned up a Familiar, feeding it 60% of her mana in one dizzying go. It left her a bit lightheaded for a minute after, but she already felt relief flooding her the moment the new bond snapped into place.
The cat looked around in apparent curiosity, large watery blue eyes blinking at the forest like they had never seen one before.
“Your task is to protect me, primarily from ambushes and projectiles too fast for me to react to myself. No killing non-monsters unless I explicitly order you to. Understood?”
The cat looked up at her, eyes flying wide open as it finally put her in its sight. Belatedly, an acknowledgement came through the bond.
The elemental now inhabiting her Familiar looked to be a bit airheaded, but there was enough firmness behind that acknowledgement that Mia trusted it to carry out her orders with some measure of competence.
Next, she slowly assembled her newest spell circle. It was a complicated one, mind-numbingly so with more than sixty runes and a complex mix of geometric forms housing them all.
Unlike with Bolt and its variants’ Mia couldn't even begin to guess which part did what. Still, despite the complexity the spell was surprisingly low cost in terms of mana. That likely had something to do with the overall low weight of the runes used and how the spell would have to be supplied with more mana to keep it active for longer than ten minutes.
After making sure the circle was perfect, she pushed a clump of mana, around twice the amount an Arcane Blast would take and cast the spell.
The spell circle blinked into existence before her palm, its separate rings spinning and revolving as it grew in size before collapsing back down. It flowed over her right arm, collecting into a much smaller circle that clung to her wrist like a bracelet.
Mia grinned, the dim pink light flowing over her hand and covering her fingers like a glove before turning translucent. A moment later, a long thin blade made of the same pink energy phased into existence and Mia’s finger’s instinctively grabbed the hilt of it.
Spectral Blade. The name was fitting, if it wasn’t for it being pink, Mia would have thought the longsword in her hand would have been fit to be the weapon of some ghost or spectral warrior.
She swung it, feeling the weight of it in her hand despite it being nothing more than mana given form.
Mode one seems to be working perfectly. Mia mused, swinging the sword around and slashing down at a trunk. The deep, sizzling gash left on the tree made her grin.
Now for mode two. Mia thought, eyes narrowing as she ignored the gawking soldiers and the curiously observing Carmilla. Selecting her next target, a bush a good five metres away, Mia pointed the sword in and with a flex of her will sent the small spell circle around her wrist spinning.
The sword flew out of her hand, shooting forth and when it reached two metres away from her, starting to spin through the air so fast only a dim pink disk could be seen.
The top half of the bush fell to the ground a second later and Mia felt the spell reach the limits of its range a moment later. The sword continued to spin wildly, but not going an inch further.
Around six metres? Seven? Mia noted that for later, then sent the bracelet-circle spinning the opposite direction and the sword came soaring back into her grasp. It’s a bit slower than shooting Bolts, but Bolts can miss … this can too, but it’s gonna be much harder to dodge.
Mia thought back to the Juggernaut, how that damned monster just kept on going even as she kept Blasting chunks of it off. If she had this spell back then, she could have shredded the beast like swiss cheese.
“I think I’m ready,” Mia said, grin still in place as she turned back to the staring soldiers. “We had a bear to hunt, didn’t we?”
“That’s awesome,” Carmilla whispered with a grin as the group set off. “That’s your new spell, isn’t it?”
“It is,” Mia said preening under the compliment. She gave her sword a playful spin which cut loose a wrist-thick branch above her head. “Eeeep!”
She jumped out of its way, not wanting to have that land atop her head. She glanced over at Carmilla, who was smiling at her, eyes twinkling in amusement. “Pretty cool indeed.”
Mia flushed, but the smile stayed on her face. Still, she made sure to be more careful with where she swung her sword for the rest of the way.