The problem with being a bottom-ranked brand new Adventurer was that it did not give her a large assortment of quality, glamorous tasks to undertake. It was an obvious lesson that she had managed to forget from back when Tatius and Pupius had to do the same.
It was predominantly scut work, and sometimes quite literally.
In what universe was hammering fence posts into the ground something Adventurers should have posted as a job?
No amount of complaining prevented her from taking it though, it paid better than the other jobs she had to choose from.
Level 80 in [Sudden End] had granted her a new skill, [Strengthen Blade], which made her knives more resilient to harm. It came as a relief; she loved her knives and every bit of damage they sustained was painful. She knew well that knives were tools, and it was inevitable that the knives would someday fail her. She knew and understood that, but they were still precious.
And the skill promised to help her keep them in hand for a bit longer.
The job request had claimed a full goblin infestation of an abandoned mining tunnel. No one believed the middle manager that had sent the job, so it ended up on Ranthia’s end of the job board.
It required far too much time—and precious daylight—for Ranthia to work her way down to the formerly sealed entrance. There had been roads, at one point in time, but the roads had been thoroughly reclaimed by nature in the intervening years since the mine had been in service. Naturally, she hadn’t known that, so she’d been holding [Channel] the entire time. She was already beginning to feel the pressure in the back of her head from the consistent concentration when she finally reached the entrance. Inside she found…
Four goblins. Short, filth-covered creatures that squatted around a halfway rotten carcass that was skewered over a small fire in the surprisingly short mineshaft that had clearly been abandoned shortly after it was started. Most likely the vein of whatever they started to dig for proved to be significantly less valuable or deep than expected. Obnoxiously, the job paid per goblin slain, and with there only being four of them… Well, that wasn’t going to exactly leave her swimming in coin.
Oh well, she was there. The job had been a gamble, and she knew this was a real possibility. She might as well clean them out to earn a few coins, plus even four goblins were a threat to quite a few people in the area.
The beasts hadn’t even noticed her presence. [Shadowed Steps] could be unfair—and it was true that goblins weren’t exactly renowned for their intelligence—but Ranthia expected more out of them.
If you looked into what killed the most Adventurers… Okay, bad question; what killed the most Adventurers was usually equipment problems. But if you looked into what monster killed the most Adventurers every year, the answer was probably goblins by a wide margin. They were relatively small, often weaker than humans, overly aggressive, and barbaric; that much was true. But they also possessed a sort of low cunning and tended to weaponize their numbers in surprisingly creative ways. There was always a sneaky one too.
It was almost like the gods had crafted them into creatures that were all too easy for people to take lightly and end up fatally surprised by. Which was why Ranthia had no intention of taking them lightly. [Identify], strangely, took a moment, but each of the goblins was well under level 90, with the lowest leveled member of the little group only at level 63.
Ranthia tucked her real body behind a mostly intact support beam, then sent a mirror image a bit behind the highest-level goblin. She released [Channel] and shifted to it, then, with a single [Blades of Darkness] empowered slash she ended the threat it posed. Such as it was.
[*ding!* You have slain a [Goblin Raider] (Earth, level 88)!]
It only had a single class, strangely. Ranthia really expected (allegedly) intelligent monsters above level 64 to have their second class. Then again, they were just goblins.
Hey, she wasn’t going to underestimate them stupidly, but that didn’t mean she was going to respect them.
The other three goblins reacted. One leapt at her, unarmed. Another picked up a sharpened bone and hissed at her. The third grabbed two handfuls of the foul-smelling meat that they had roasting over their little fire and tried to flee.
Ranthia threw a new mirror image in front of the meat-greedy goblin that fled—since it was bound towards her real body—then threw a second image in front of the only armed goblin. She didn’t want to burn her mana—or deal with [Channel] mid-battle while she was still getting used to the skill—to shift a second time, so instead she leapt over the fire, dodged around the unarmed goblin, and ran down the fleeing goblin. With another use of [Blades of Darkness] she cleaved through its spine in a single slash, before she turned back to the other two. It went down but didn’t immediately die.
In the interim, the goblin that had lunged at her was so overcommitted to its lunge that it crashed into the ground making confused noises. The goblin armed with the bone had backed away from the static image that menaced it. She hadn’t even had the focus to animate the image, yet it still held the goblin in check.
Ranthia reached the goblin that had hit the ground while it was still picking itself up and sliced cleanly through the goblin’s neck. There was no need to burn the mana required to enhance the attack with a skill, not with such a perfectly presented target.
[*ding!* You have slain a [Goblin Grappler] (Wood, level 72)!]
The goblin with the sharpened bone continued to hiss and face off with her still under-animated mirror image. Ranthia skulked behind it with [Shadowed Steps], not expecting much, yet the stupid thing never even seemed to notice her presence behind it. In the end, she was able to drive a [Blades of Darkness] enhanced blow through the back of the goblin’s head unchallenged.
[*ding!* You have slain a [Goblin Bonecaller] (Dark, level 63)!]
Ranthia paused for a moment while she wondered what the heck a [Goblin Bonecaller] did, before she got the final notification over the goblin that she had severed the spine of.
[*ding!* You have slain a [Goblin Thief] (Fire, level 80)!]
Yeah, that fit. It sure seemed like typical thief behavior to snatch your friends’ food and try to leave them to die.
Ranthia immediately started using [Channel] until she was able to shift back to her original body and spent some time investigating the cave and the immediate area, to ensure there were no other goblins lurking around or signs of a larger group. Only once she was convinced that it was clear (so much for there always being a sneaky one) did she return to collect the ears that would serve as her proof of kill for the guild. Not that anyone really wanted to handle goblin ears, but an Adventurer’s Guild couldn’t function entirely off the honor system.
Once again Ranthia entered her favorite apothecary and picked up a bottle to replace the blood clotting potion she had lost. Not that she had used it. Embarrassingly enough, she had managed to accidentally stumble and took a bit of a tumble while she tried to catch a rabbit for dinner. She got overconfident and tried to catch it alive.
Overall, the attempt had not gone nearly as well as she envisioned.
She made it to the counter with her purchase before the old man could grumble about her lurking around without buying anything this time. He confirmed the potion by touching the odd little marks they made on the back of the bottles and grumbled out the price, which she paid without a single complaint despite the fact that he had obviously added five coins to the price.
Her lack of protest seemed to annoy him even more.
“Oh, Ranthia!”
Ranthia was wholly unable to completely stop the silly grin that formed on her face when the object of her interests emerged.
“Hi! I accidentally smashed one of my potions and figured I’d pick up a replacement on my way home.” Ranthia lied; she had travelled clear across town to buy the replacement from this particular shop.
“Oh no! Oh, I do wish we could manage a more durable bottle, I’m sure it’s difficult to adventure with such delicate clay vessels.” The young woman looked so apologetic.
“It’s okay, it’s actually super handy to have the bottles easy to break,” Ranthia’s mind clawed desperately for an example that supported her lie, “it lets us access them more easily in an emergency.”
A bit of a lame attempt, she admitted to herself. Though the young woman seemed relieved. Ranthia still hated herself for managing to miss the young woman’s name, especially since it hadn’t come up again. …That she had noticed, at least.
She was absolutely certain that the woman was flirting with her in her more recent visits, which was extremely distracting. Some visits she managed to forget to even flirt back!
“Well, if you say so… Oh! I was actually just going to convince my grandfather to close up shop for the night so I could go to the market before it closes. Would you care to join me?” The young woman asked.
“Yes!” Ranthia replied, with entirely too great a volume.
[Cute] loved an evening spent arm-in-arm with a lovely young lady and got its first levels—plural!—in ages. They giggled and wandered about the shops as they slowly filled the lady’s bag with the items she needed. She even coerced Ranthia into spending far too much coin on one of those silly green dyed women’s tunics because she described the prospective Ranthia that wore it as “perfect.”
Ranthia’s mood was very nearly ruined at the end of the evening when she got mistaken for a man for the second time in recent memory. It was brief and the woman swiftly corrected herself. Ranthia even knew that it was because she was arm-in-arm with a far more traditionally feminine young woman (Remus was accepting of same-sex couples, but there was always a presumption of standard child-bearing relationships), but it still stung. Of course, the young lady salvaged Ranthia’s grumpy mood when she declared that she had fun and the two of them simply must spend more time together.
Ranthia, emboldened by the lovely nameless young lady’s approval, vowed to put real effort into leveling [Cute] further.
[*ding!* [Cute] has leveled from 49 to level 53!]
The next morning Ranthia visited the baths in town, instead of making use of her scrubbing bucket in her room. She had completely cut herself off from accepting financial assistance from the men now that she could take her own jobs properly, but she had swiftly found that it had made her a bit of a miser when it came to spending coin on “non-essentials.” Still, she forced herself to pay the cost for access to the baths and scrubbed herself with cloths and scented oils until her skin was undeniably cleansed while she soaked in the vast, steaming tub.
…And inwardly admitted to herself that she just might have been committing a grave mistake by writing the baths off as a non-essential.
[*ding!* [Cute] has reached level 54!]
Two days and one well-paying—for her rank—Adventuring job later, Ranthia found herself outside the only building of its kind in Sardonia. The most non-essential of non-essentials. It was a location that she never thought she’d set foot within. Ranthia fingered nervously at her nice, dyed women’s tunic that her paramour had picked out for her. And, at length, she worked up the courage to enter the salon.
The man at the counter directed her into a side room where a large, curvy woman waited. The woman positively beamed at her and guided her into a chair as she introduced herself pointlessly; not that she could have known that Ranthia was a terrible person who was almost pathologically incapable of remembering names.
Ranthia had felt intimidated, but the mature woman’s boisterous charisma broke through her guard and soon enough had her opening up. When she learned that Ranthia had [Cute] and its level, the woman, quite reasonably, assumed Ranthia had only recently acquired it. Ranthia had to shyly answer that she had taken the skill at unlock but had been terrible about doing anything that the skill actually liked.
The woman promised that together they would fix that. Ranthia was impressed with the woman’s zeal and chose to believe.
The woman continued to engage Ranthia in conversation while she fussed over the youth. In her skilled hands (literally, skills were involved), Ranthia’s short dark brown hair became a cute, stylish cut that added no length. It also gained a healthy gloss that her abuse had long prevented. Unwanted body hair—mostly still unfamiliar to her—was eliminated as if it had never dared sprout. Her tanned skin even looked healthier.
“So let me guess, you’re renewing your look because you met a cute guy, yeah?” The boisterous woman finally, now that Ranthia had relaxed enough, went for the obvious.
“…Girl, actually.” Ranthia confessed.
“Ooh, you just have to tell me all about her!” The woman smoothly responded.
Ranthia’s final defenses crumbled, and she responded eagerly.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
In the end, she bought an assortment of creams and scented body oils from the woman that promised to help keep her hair and skin looking their best and grant her a more appealing aroma.
The next morning, an overpoweringly scented Ranthia returned to get clarification on dosages.
That very evening Ranthia brought the lovely young lady just outside of town. They shared some sweets that Ranthia had bought—her romantic interest liked them, she could deal—while they relaxed together and watched the sunset. The girl sought Ranthia’s hand.
When the stars started to emerge, Ranthia sought her lips. The two shared their first kiss while the last bit of sunlight disappeared over the horizon.
[*ding!* [Cute] has leveled from 67 to level 69!]
[*ding!* Would you like to evolve [Cute] into [Sexy]?]
[Sexy]: You have matured both physically and mentally and have embraced your femininity. Now wield it to draw more eyes and capture more hearts! -24 Mana Regen Rate.
Had Ranthia gotten the joke involved in the upgrade offer she might have rejected it out of hand, but instead she happily accepted.
Part of her—the part that remembered, in some vague sense of the word, that she was (probably) once an adult—balked a little at the notion of a not-quite-15-year-old being [Sexy], but the rest of her quashed that sentiment mercilessly.
Besides, she had just shared her first kiss with her girlfriend. She was ready for the second.
And many, many more.
Ranthia restrained herself from taking the relationship quite as far as she had sorely been tempted to. Not that she—or her girlfriend—held out very long thereafter. After that stage in their relationship, Ranthia was positively bubbly for weeks, which amused Pupius almost as much as it annoyed Tatius. She redoubled her efforts on her Adventuring though, with vague dreams of earning a vast pile of rods and marrying her sweetheart. She mostly operated solo, but on occasion she teamed up with her—largely former—guardians when the right job came in.
[Reflections of Reality] had proven to be downright obnoxious to level. The skill seemed to spit out the rare level only grudgingly when she really risked life and limb against a threat that could end her with ease if it could get past her tricks, made worse by how rarely she was able to use the skill. Mana potions had become her largest expense by a huge margin, which made it all the more difficult to earn excess coin.
At some point, arcanite was a better investment, but the stones were rare and egregiously expensive out in Sardonia. None of the local mines produced it, and relatively few merchant caravans bothered to come out so far. And, naturally, those that did weren’t exactly paragons of great bargains.
More than once Ranthia got to briefly experience what it felt like to be maimed or crippled before she shifted to another mirror image body—or her original body—and threw herself back into the fray.
Pain quite rapidly became familiar. It wasn’t always a warning of something best avoided any longer; with her build it was just another obstacle to the optimal flow of battle.
Her combat style was often aggressive, so recklessness was just a spice that she could finally indulge in. …So long as she was cautious about her mana and her ability to [Channel].
Ranthia—together with Tatius and Pupius—had taken on a job to investigate a missing supply convoy that should have arrived several days earlier. In all likelihood there was just some delay, it would have been far from the first, but it always paid to check. Not that it stopped them from having a bit of fun. Pupius and Ranthia raced, not that Ranthia stood a chance even when Pupius restricted himself to moving backwards and hopping. Still, it was fun, and Ranthia gamely pushed on until they erupted into a clearing that was often used as a campsite for convoys, located just off the road.
Pupius had won, but when Ranthia reached him—eager to catch her breath—she completely missed how still Pupius had become.
“Ornithocheirus!” The man screamed.
There was raw horror in his voice.
Ornithocheirus were the winged dread that all within Remus feared. Every errant cloud caused every man, woman, and child in its path to freeze and look up. For many who had endured an attack from one of the swarms, a single bird in the sky triggered such dread and terror that they had to rush indoors until the sky cleared.
Ranthia knew of them—her chaotic knowledge even vaguely noted the danger they posed—but she had never actually dealt with a swarm. She had only seen them from a distance, bound in a different direction. She had never truly respected what they represented.
Death.
There was pure panicked terror sculpted onto the faces of the men while they all desperately fled. Ranthia—briefly—tried to disrupt the pursuit of the flock of murderbeasts with her usual tactics but they just… swarmed. [Reflections of Reality] was a suicidal tactic, utterly useless in the face of the wonton destruction and absolute presence of the flock. Her images were destroyed—often by a mass of divebombing beasts—far faster than she could shift even if she actually had the [Channel] primed. [Boosted Reflexes] wasn’t fast enough to give her warning, if she relied on it, she’d just end up killed. The damned things even divebombed faster than Pupius could handle.
Over and over, Ranthia desperately sent out images with [Scattered Reflections] as far away from them as possible while the trio crashed through the woodlands in a desperate attempt to escape. Unfortunately, the bulk of the flock seemed to favor what they perceived as the largest concentration of food. Ranthia wasn’t able to get enough images together at once to distract the bulk of the flock before they were destroyed by the odd few dinosaurs that went for them.
Ranthia’s lungs burned. For the first time in her second life, she knew true immediate terror. She would have prayed to Xaoc for a miracle had she just had a single moment to spare—her usual rules be damned—but the slightest distraction promised a swift end.
If she was struck, Tatius and Pupius couldn’t save her. And she hoped they wouldn’t sacrifice themselves to try.
They escaped, but it wasn’t unscathed. Pupius had a nasty wound from a near miss by one of the accursed divebombing murderbeasts that had just… erased a chunk of flesh from his forearm, along with the leather armor that had protected it. Tatius had abandoned the bulk of his gear, having thrown it at some of the winged horrors. All he had left was his spear and the bits of armor that he couldn’t remove while on the run.
All in all, between the lost (and subsequently destroyed) equipment and Pupius undeniably in need of a [Healer], the mission was an incredibly expensive failure. That was part of being an Adventurer—Ranthia knew well that the profession was notoriously risky—but Ranthia had never quite appreciated the truth of how thin a line lay between success and financial ruin.
It was the first time since their first kiss that Ranthia wasn’t even in the mood to do more with her girlfriend that night than just cuddles beneath the stars. She was just fine, they all were. Even Pupius was fine after a visit to the town’s solitary [Healer]. Still, Ranthia had to continually remind herself of that while she spent time with the young woman that was the object of her affections.
She knew without a single doubt that she’d still cringe every time that a bird flew overhead for a long while and that she had forever joined the population in wary checks of the sky any time a cloud blocked the light of the sun or her beloved moons.
But for that moment, she was just fine and was happily cozily entwined with her girlfriend.
After Tatius, Pupius, and Ranthia pooled their funds—and they finished judging her for just keeping her coin in a box under her bed—they had just enough money that they could resupply Tatius with the bare essentials.
It had been a near thing though, after the expense of Pupius’ healing.
Unanimously, they decided that they needed to find another job the moment that Tatius was confident with his new equipment. The best job they could take was slightly old, a manhunt for a Water [Mage] that was wanted for drowning multiple people across several different towns. It was a rare job to clean up where Rangers had failed, though it promised to be an obnoxious hunt with a trail so cold. They had seen the job on the board before, but had never been interested in it. It was a risky blend of dangerous and investigative, but they needed the money.
Naturally, on their way out of town the trio passed by the ‘missing’ supply convoy. The convoy had just run late after all.
It was the first time any of them had set foot in Remus proper—Sardonia was in Remus, but it was so isolated that they might as well have been removed from their ‘empire’—in over a year. None of them had planned to settle down, but it just kind of happened.
The men seemed to be glad to be back on the road, but for Ranthia she was just struck with a sort of loneliness that she hadn’t felt since she landed in the care of the men. She still loved them, they were great, but they weren’t her girlfriend either.
At least it was only temporary.
There was still unrest and apprehension in nearly every town they passed through as they sought information about their mark. Many were still hesitant about their new emperor, and there were rumors of some controversial new policy that was slowly spreading throughout Remus that ‘changed everything.’
At least the rumors made it easier for Ranthia to convince the men to return to Sardonia once they found their mark.
It was, allegedly, fairly typical. The one that led them to their target was a jilted lover that the target had left heartbroken. The (literally) [Pretty] young man gave them clear details about where to find his (impressive profanity omitted) ex.
Their mark had allegedly upgraded at least one of his Water [Mage] classes into the advanced element, Mirage. Using his new abilities he had supposedly replaced a ‘missing’ wealthy investor—no doubt yet another victim—and lived inside the man’s estate.
According to the jilted young man, their mark—Lacintus—was still not entirely great with his Mirage abilities and struggled to convey realistic emotion with his duplicates. Also, allegedly, Pupius was exactly the man’s type.
Not bad for freely volunteered information. They hadn’t even needed to intimidate or bribe the young man!
Life as an Adventurer meant sometimes that trivialities like laws needed to be set aside. They were on a proper official job from Remus as a whole, which meant in theory that they had the right to coordinate with the town guard.
In practice, none of them wanted to try to convince the guard to participate in an unannounced intrusion into a wealthy man’s estate based on the word of one (1) emotional young man.
Instead, late one moonless night, Pupius picked a lock—a skill Ranthia hadn’t known he possessed, she solicited a promise from him to teach her another time—and the three crept into the estate. There was only one word to describe an estate that was wholly devoid of staff or slaves in the dark of the night: creepy.
The trio soon separated as they checked individual rooms and parts of the estate. They kept to the same general area to stay within rapid response range of one another, but the estate was too large for them to stay together while they searched. It would have been all too easy to miss their mark entirely if they had.
Plus, the guy was estimated to be approximately Ranthia’s level, with an advanced element that couldn’t kill anyone in at least one of his two classes. They were fine.
Ranthia opened her 16th bedroom door—seriously why would anyone ever require so many large bedrooms—and found herself face-to-face with a man that looked exactly how Lacintus had been described.
Somewhere between her height and Pupius’, blond hair, pointed chin, pale blue eyes.
The man had a stricken, panicked look on his face and froze in position.
…Except [Identify] returned nothing. Even when Ranthia gave it a moment, just in case the skill was being weird again.
“Nice try, you’re better at your Mirages than I heard.” Ranthia snarked, before she turned away.
He had to be clo—
The blow made Ranthia stumble into the wall. Momentarily she was knocked senseless when the thick—and likely expensive, which seemed like a strange thing for her to fixate on—vase was smashed into the back of her head.
The man shoved her as he ran past, but she still refused to go down. She just braced herself against the wall and shook her head until it cleared.
“He’s here!” Ranthia called out as soon as she was able.
Ranthia forced herself to pursue and her footing stabilized quickly once she started to move. Her head throbbed and she was sure she’d feel blood if she checked her hair, but she wasn’t down. She had enough vitality to shrug off even that shattered bit of expensive pottery, at least for the short term.
The fact that [Identify] hadn’t recognized the man as there was… strange. She had no doubts that the one that had attacked her had been exactly the man she shrugged off as an illusion. There were only two possible explanations. The first would have, under ordinary circumstances, been the only possibility: their mark had some sort of skill that helped him hide from skills like [Identify]. …But her skill had been oddly delayed enough times in recent memory that she hesitated to completely write off the second possibility.
Was there something wrong with her [Identify] skill? …The skill that claimed to have been bound to her by a wholly impossible act.
The odds felt high enough that Ranthia decided not to call out a warning that the man might be resistant to [Identify]. There was no room for distractions like arguing with the men about whether or not a Skill could go ‘off.’
Pupius caught up to her swiftly. They had both levelled more than once since Ranthia last asked, but she and Tatius had very similar speed stats at that point, which meant that the heavily geared man would be hard-pressed to catch up.
Pupius took point as they wound through the dark hallways—saved from collisions at every turn by the glory of dexterity—and soon found themselves bolting out a doorway that led beyond the town walls.
…Seriously, how did anyone consider giving someone rich a way to bypass the city walls and checkpoints a good idea?
Pupius came to an immediate halt. A thick fog had engulfed the entire area.
“You shouldn’t have dared to come after me, Rangers!” Their quarry called out.
He seemed to be operating under some severe misconceptions, but neither Ranthia nor Pupius seemed inclined to correct him. Slowly, they got a bit of distance from each other while they peered into the wispy depths of the fog. Not that they could see much, between the fog and the lack of light.
Naturally, Tatius was the only one of them that carried a torch.
“There!” Pupius suddenly roared as he lunged into the depths of the mist.
Ranthia hurled a curse after him. Of all the reckless, stupid…!
Pupius’ voice could be heard from the depths while he called out, over and over again, that he had eyes on their target, but Ranthia couldn’t see him or their target.
Ranthia moved slowly through a shallow area while she awaited Tatius. They needed more illumination, and they needed to stick together in such a quagmire.
[Boosted Reflexes] warned her before her eyes caught the movement in the mist. Ranthia trusted herself to her skills while she turned. Her knife caught the short sword and, while she lacked the strength to turn it aside, it gave her the leverage she needed to dodge out of the strike’s path.
Ranthia counter-attacked with a string of profanity, which helped Pupius realize that he’d almost run her through before he even made out who he saw through the mists.
“Gods, Ranthia I’m so sorry, I saw him running this way, and…” Pupius stammered, ashen-faced.
“He’s using Mirages, you idiot! Illusions! The fog makes it easy for him!” Ranthia lambasted him, once she was done with her curses.
Their quarry laughed, somewhere in the mists.
“We can’t just let this shit escape!” Pupius declared, practically half-ready to lunge back into the mists.
“No! Bad, stay!” Ranthia snapped.
“…I’m not a dog.” Pupius all but whined.
“What’s your plan, then?” Tatius’ voice reached them shortly before he did.
Ranthia just smiled into the mists.
“Poor guy has no idea who he’s challenging.” She promised the men.
Now that they were, finally, both present and accounted for, Ranthia was able to begin her counterattack. As swiftly as [Scattered Reflections] allowed, Ranthia sent image after image into the mists.
Her skill required line of sight, and the fog proved to be a strange partial obstacle. It restricted how far she could initially send an image, but she had no trouble using her other skills to manipulate the images. [Reflective Motility] allowed her images to walk further into the depths of the swirling mist. [Echoes Reflected] still let her cackle through her images, albeit with a strange, inhuman crackle due to the distortion of the low level skill.
Ranthia sent as many images as her current skill levels allowed into the mists and had them roam about, knives drawn, intermittently unleashing random cackles. [A Looking Glass] wasn’t useful, since it distorted and limited what she could see on top of the low visibility from the lack of light and the thick fog, but she didn’t need it.
She just needed to wait for one of her images to find the guy. After all, if all of her other skills still worked…
[Reflections of Reality] would bring her straight to their quarry, and all she needed to do was find him. She absolutely wasn’t going to start using [Channel] yet though, she was having enough trouble focusing on keeping so many images mobile. She might have seriously underestimated how much of an obstacle the focus [Channel] required could be.
Time ticked by. Pupius was all too quick to point out every bit of movement that he thought he saw in the fog, but Ranthia was patient. She just focused on her task and trusted Tatius to keep the man from doing something (else) idiotic.
And then, at long last, the fog vanished as if it had never been there.
“P… please! I give up! Just no more knives! Everywhere I look there’re cloaked women with knives!” The small, desperate voice of a broken man cried out.
Ranthia had one of her images confirm that he was real, then finally Pupius was unleashed to restrain the guy. Ranthia was nursing a bit of a headache from managing so many images—even if the fog had reduced a lot of the overhead effort that she usually had to expend on realism—but it was worth it.
Bringing the guy in alive was probably worth a bonus.