The swirling essences shifted between glowing blue, green, and yellow suddenly shined bright crimson, startling Dalen slightly. He regretted his impulse immediately but surprisingly the glass bottle didn’t explode in his fist.
Potion Complete
Efficiency: 5%
Potency: 100%
Rarity: Rare
Do you wish to name this potion?
Dalen dismissed the notification and rushed to Nyx’s side. Her stomach was writhing and Melisia grunted as she continued casting her healing spell back to back. Not wasting any more time Dalen poured the mixture into Nyx’s mouth and massaged her throat to force it down.
He had no idea if it would work but what else could he do, the rest of the order was scrambling to fight off the bloody things that did this.
A moment passed and Melisia staggered and fell to her knees, “I’m almost out of mana,” she said, trying to catch her breath.”
Had it failed? It should have done something by no- a crimson light radiated from Nyx’s mouth and she suddenly awoke with a gasp and pained hiss. The crimson light moved from her mouth and down her throat bright enough that he could see it through her skin. When the light reached her chest the writhing of her stomach abruptly stopped and Nyx sighed with relief as color slowly started to return to her features.
Melisia used her healing skill again and let out a relieved sigh, “It worked, her health isn’t dropping now.”
Another pillar of flame and in human scream from a gorefiend made Dalen turn back to look through the line of guards protecting them. Leo had moved onto a third-shaped one while the other men tried to hunt down any of the worms that had been expelled from the corpses of the animals that didn’t make it.
The guards protecting them had taken several wounds as well, most had been lucky enough to avoid being implanted but two were down in silent agony. If Melisia’s healing didn’t work while the Nyx had one of those things in her he doubted it would work for them either. He couldn’t waste any more ingredients on bottle-mixing potions he was going to have to treat more people so Dalen gritted his teeth and moved through the guards to get to his pack.
One of them went to stop him but a growl and a few choice words solved that problem. Two of the men followed him as he jogged over to what was left of his old horse. He reached down to pull his cauldron from his pack and two worms burst from the horse's remains but the guards were fast and ready for the surprise attack and speared them out of the air before they could strike him.
From here Dalen could see that the order was starting to get control of the situation, the last of the shaped ones were dead but soldiers stayed on guard with select squads moving through the ranks hunting worms.
A few healers had begun realizing their skills weren’t working so Dalen turned to the guard as he set his cauldron next to his dead horse and began uncorking bottles, “Tell everyone to bring whoever got stung by those damned things to come here,” The soldier hesitated for a moment. Great of course I get someone who isn’t a fanatic when I want one, “Just do it, Now!”
The soldier turned to the other who Dalen recognized as the one who had fled from the tent when Leo was joking about Dalen being a prophet. That one nodded and ran off to spread the word. Grumbling to himself Dalen continued his alchemy, he still wasn't worried about waste. Just doing it in the cauldron should help get more doses out of his ingredients.
What had attacked them was insidious, each worm chewing through its victim could turn into one of those shaped ones. They needed to kill them all, and right now alchemy was Dalen’s only plan. He just hoped he would have enough.
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Leo hacked through the third demon, igniting its flesh as he went. It burned quickly but he didn’t let up his constant onslaught of fire until he received the kill notification. More worms had burst free before he could get close enough to kill the thing but the order soldiers around him quickly sought them out and dealt with them.
When Leo saw things burst free from Dalen’s horse he had paled not because of the grotesque display but because he had recognized the things from the Blood Hunt. Even now he shivered at the thought. He had seen Kal fighting these things. No, not fighting, slaughtering.
He brought his mind back to the present and joined the soldiers on their hunt for the worms. As he moved every downed horse he found he burned. Several men were being carried towards where he had last seen Dalen, all of them either screaming or catatonic from the pain. He had seen what those things had done to the horses but he wasn’t about to start burning people if he could help it. But he also wasn’t going to let Dalen be so close to them without his protection.
Leo turned to Elder Hedrik who had been moving alongside him during his clean-up, “I’m going to check on Dalen.”
Hedrik nodded, “I will continue to assist in the cleansing.”
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They parted and Leo entered the circle of guards that had arranged themselves in a defensive position around Dalen. Melisia and a fragile-looking Nyx arrived at the same time. A few of the other elders along with Elder Jaliete had also entered the circle, her face grim for obvious reasons.
There were already several wounded order soldiers lying in rows on the ground with more on the way. All of them were at least level sixty but a few were higher leveled and seemed to be in less pain but were still clearly on the brink. There were several dead on one side that were surrounded by another circle of soldiers. The crushed remains of several worms made their cause of death clear.
He couldn’t identify them now but he suspected that these were too weak to survive the worm's carnage for long. A sudden splattering of blood answered his next question as tendrils burst from one of the corpses. Luckily the soldiers surrounding the bodies were ready and managed to deflect it while another used a fire skill on the body. Then proceeded to burn all of the dead bodies.
What a mess, He had expected a fight with an elemental, not this. If more of those things somehow reached them everything could get much worse, “Elder Jaliete, might I suggest you take us back out of the crossing? I feel we have all the information we need about the state of the fractured path.”
She ignored him and instead turned to Melisia, “What do you see Daughter?”
Melisia helped Nyx sit down before nodding and Leo saw her eyes glow blue, the hallmarks of her activating Comprehend the Astral Threads epic skill. She grimaced but Leo could clearly see her scanning the air in front of her.
Her eyes stopped glowing but her expression remained grim, “They're gone…”
“Thank fuck for that!” Dalen called out as he hurriedly stirred his cauldron and started bottling whatever he had made up.”
“No… No, I mean the threads. They're gone. What allowed us to enter the crossing snapped the moment we entered,” She said, making Dalen’s mouth snap shut.
There was a sudden and all eyes turned towards Elder Jaliete who nodded, “I suspected as much. It appears the choice has been made for us. We will walk the fractured path to our destination. We will mourn the dead later, continue to burn the dead,” she looked at Dalen as started handing out vials of glowing crimson to the healers who immediately started administering them to the wounded.
Leo used Identify on one before it was used.
Dalen’s Don't read this you idiot!
Just give it to the next guy with twisting guts. If you have gotten this far Kal would be disappointed.
The elders moved away towards the large building, Melisia followed them but again Leo wasn’t comfortable leaving Dalen behind in a place like this. Leo watched carefully as each of the potions was given and couldn’t help but notice the crimson color of the light as it moved through the imbiber’s body.
He glanced at Dalen as he returned to mixing more potions and glared at the bodies of the worms dotting the area around him. The look in Dalen’s eyes raised the hair on the back of Leo’s neck for an instant as another memory from the Blood Hunt returned to him.
The memory faded faster than it came and Leo shook his head as he walked over to the man, “Is there anything I can do?”
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“It is far worse than we could have ever anticipated,” Elder Jaliete said quietly as they moved away from the rest of the order towards the entrance between the huge columns.
Melisia was already terrified at the idea of the crossing being separated from the forest they had just left but with Jaliete talking as she was put Melisia even further on edge, “How did it break? Has anything like this happened before?”
“No Daughter, never. As for how it was broken I don’t know. I fear we don’t have the time to perform the appropriate tests to be certain but I have my suspicions,” They arrived at a set of huge black doors that were covered with intricate engravings and copper filigree.
The engraving seemed to depict a city, unlike anything Melisia had seen before. Elder Jaliete ignored the engraving and as she continued to approach the giant door pulsed with crimson light before soundlessly swinging open.
Melisia had expected to find a lobby of some kind but instead, her eyes almost rolled into the back of her head as she was met with a wall of twisted space. It rippled like a pond in the rain each ripple dragging her attention away from the barely visible scene behind it.
“We will talk about it once we are on the path. Now Daughter, what do you see?
The other elders were all just as affected by the disorientation of the strange space in front of them. Melisia forced her gaze back onto the scene being twisted and distorted by the ripples, it was hard but her high perception was enough to allow her to finally make it out. It was the Vault. A place she had only been to a handful of times in her early life.
The great black walls of the Vault stood as the sky around it twisted with the ripples and flashes of red and black light shone between the clouds, “I see the Vault but it looks different somehow.”
Elder Jaliete nodded, “And with your skill?”
Melisia activated Comprehend the Astral Threads and the rippling wall of light vanished becoming an astoundingly complicated tapestry of millions of threads. She staggered at the sight but also sighed with relief to find these ones intact, unlike the others at the crossing.
Each thread was of a blue silver light to Melisia’s eye not because that was the thread's affinity but because of Comprehend the Astral Threads. The skill did not grant her affinity to all types of mana but it did allow her to see them and attempt to understand what the purpose of the accumulated threads was.
What was in front of her now was far beyond anything she had a chance at understanding so quickly but what she could say for certain was that the function of the array or artifact in front of her remained intact.
“I barely understand anything I’m looking at but I can say for certain that the threads all appear to be intact.”
Elder Jaliete nodded her expression, still grim, “Good, We must depart immediately.”