Yep, it was as bad as he had thought, his on-the-move question-and-answer game soon became a campfire interrogation. At least Dalen was able to hand out the last of his beers now, he targeted the lower leveled people since they were the ones who had burned through their stamina the most throughout the day.
Dalen hadn’t even bothered setting up his tent as he was practically swamped by a new batch of order members coming to ask questions. For the most part, they asked very similar questions, all of them a bit creepy for Dalen such as “What will he do when he returns?” or “Is it true? Will he lead us?”
Of course, these were the ones that Dalen had to try and dodge the best he could. Telling them that Kal likely wouldn’t care about them when he got back wasn’t going to help encourage them and others to his and by proxy Kal’s side. Well mainly his, they were all clearly enamored by Kal already without even having met him.
Surely there were more prophecies that he wasn’t aware of to inspire such a reverence. He would have to ask a few about that later but right now he had to make it through the night.
An hour passed by while Dalen avoided several questions regarding Kal’s future goals but then a very young boy came over to sit beside him. He was a pretty scruffy kid with dark brown hair and a certain glint in his green eyes which immediately reminded him of Kal despite Kal’s eyes being blue. He would have identified the boy but since gaining Alchemist’s Eye it didn’t work that way anymore.
The boy didn’t say anything straight away as others continued to jump in with questions that Dalen had already answered several times. “Yes, he hates kidnapping. No, he has no respect for the nobles. No, he wouldn’t want to kill them all.”
After a while Dalen raised his hand partly to give the boy a chance to speak and partly to slow the oncoming headache. He leaned over to the boy, “What’s your name?”
The boy’s face reddened and he suddenly looked like he didn’t want to be anywhere near the campfire and under the gaze of his the rest of the followers let alone Dalen’s.
Dalen cringed internally but he didn’t let it show on his face, “It’s ok, everyone should get a chance to speak.”
The boy’s face reddened even further but he looked up at Dalen, trying to ignore the others, “I, uh. I’m Ander.”
“Hello Ander, did you have a question?”
“Yes… My mum says that He is a monster but if you were his friend how could he be like that? What is he like?”
A smile immediately appeared across Dalen’s face. A child had been the one to ask a question that was actually worth answering. Ander was the first to question what the other members of the order had been spouting since the beginning.
“Well Kal is certainly not a monster, he can definitely be an angry prick but it was understandable for a person in his position.” Dalen didn’t need to fake the smile on his face as he replied, his casual insult shocked the people around but before any spoke he continued, “And Kal would have been disappointed if I hadn’t referred to him as such. Ander, he asked a far more important question than any of the others I have heard tonight. No Ander, Kalum is not a monster, far from it, he is a troubled young man, failing to ascend had been a terrible burden as I’m sure you could all understand. But he never let that stop him from doing what he believed was right.”
The insult was quickly forgotten as Dalen brought up the details of Kal’s failed ascendancy. A man standing on the opposite side of the fire spoke up, “He doesn’t need a class. If the prophecies are true then he could crush us all with his wrath,” the man almost sounded annoyed.
“I have not seen much of these prophecies but I do not lie when I say that Kal was not powerful, no not in the way that you mean,” Dalen replied, eyeing the man, “This a story you may have already heard but perhaps it may put things into perspective.”
Dalen then went over everything he could remember of the day he had once again found himself dragging Kal to a bed, his friend battered and bruised after yet another one of his reckless escapades. Dalen spoke how despite his wounds from the day before Kal had risked his life for someone he barely knew. Was it stupid? Yes. Was it exactly what Dalen would have expected him to do? Gods yes, despite Dalen’s words of warning.
Dalen now knew that Kal surviving that fight was likely due to both his birthright and damned big helping of luck but to the followers of the order the mention of his birthright and his tenacity only improved the story.
The constant questions had completely ceased once the story had begun allowing Dalen to say everything he needed to and finished by saying, “Do you know why Kal fought so hard that day?”
No one responded, all of them listening intently awaiting the answer, “It was because he could not abide the idea that some would suffer the loss of a child while he could do something about it.”
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The gathering had grown into a small crowd during the story. It wasn’t some epic tale of myth but it was the truth and Dalen could tell the crowd believed it, he just wished Harlm was here to reinforce it. To his surprise, a voice he recognized was the first to speak up.
“I have felt His presence and so have those who witnessed the tear,” Nyx said as she stepped into the firelight and took a seat on the other side of Dalen, “Something dark and powerful dwells within Him.”
Dalen had wanted to avoid that particular aspect of Kal but it was unavoidable he supposed, so Dalen decided to just say what he felt. He had been thinking about it over the last few days, Dalen couldn’t deny the dark oppressive aura he had felt from Kal in the camp and later during the Blood Hunt but during both of those events, he had been left unharmed, if a little disorientated and afraid especially the during the latter time.
It bothered him that he knew so little of his friend's birthright but everyone else was just as blind. But Dalen knew one thing, and that was if he had to choose anyone to have the power he felt during the Blood Hunt, Kal was that person, “Yes Nyx but let me ask you this,” Dalen paused as suddenly thought of the perfect thing to say that embodied his thoughts perfectly, “Who would you rather wield such power? A tyrant who would use it for their personal gain? One of the gods who wish to hide this knowledge from the world? Or perhaps the man who always does what he believes is right despite the risk to his own well-being?”
The crowd seemed to take his words to heart. It seemed that though they believed in the prophecies wholeheartedly, hearing Dalen’s words clearly had an impression on them. Ander left after a quick thank and Dalen saw him run off to a middle-aged woman he recognized as one of the women from the retrieval team. It was Kiara the illusionist, she smiled at him before walking away with Ander.
Dalen was starting to suspect the boy’s question was a ploy from Nyx and turning to face her and seeing the slight smile, barely concealed, practically confirmed it. Well, he couldn’t complain it had helped him say a few things that needed telling.
The crowd soon began to depart back to their tents and other duties. Dalen did the same, he would be lucky to get an hour or two of rest because of that interrogation. But deep down he knew it was worth it. If Kal was going to be thrown into a role like these people expected him to be, Dalen wanted him to have loyal allies and not some mystical order with their own agenda.
Now he would rest and tomorrow he would see what Melisia had learned and try to make sense of these apparent factions with the order. Hopefully, he would be able to learn a few things before they reached the Fractured Path. Something was telling him that things were about to get even more complicated.
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If gorefiends weren’t Kal’s most hated demon before they definitely were now. Moving through the butcher’s territory had become a slog of vomit-inducing smells and near-constant harassment from shaped ones. The flesh-like terrain hadn’t changed much besides becoming even more disturbing, nearly every step he took he could feel the ground shudder.
After the first day, Kal tried stabbing the ground since it was so flesh-like. It sprayed rancid-smelling blood all over him, making him instantly regret it. Kal hadn’t bathed at all since arriving in the abyss so he already stank of blood and stale sweat but this was so much worse. It was so bad that he thought it might actually poison him but after a few minutes, he hadn’t noticed any ill effects.
The wound in the ground bled for longer than it should have, nearly ten full minutes. When it did finally stop the wound had literally clotted and formed a large scab, yuck…
Kal was honestly surprised that he hadn’t come across any new gorefiend variants yet, perhaps he was lucky and since the gorefiends could so easily spread through the corpses of the other demons maybe there was some kind of limit to what could be brought into the trial.
The seeker shadow’s territory had been home to the dark serpents which were significantly stronger than most of the other demons he had fought but compared to the garghound, kuroxet, and the gorefiends their numbers were far more limited.
It would be great if Kal had to worry about getting overrun by a huge horde of gorefiends, he could handle those since his wrath was practically unlimited when he was fighting large numbers.
Kal was about to keep moving towards conduit but as he took his first step and his foot was about to touch the ground the sound of tearing flesh was all the warning he got as the ground beneath his foot opened up into a large gaping wound and Kal tumbled into the gore of the plain of flesh.
Kal tried to reach for the edge of the tear but his arm was battered away by a tendon-like lash that cut deep into the meat of his arm and hit him hard enough to make him spin end over end as he fell. An instant later the flesh above him closed over leaving Kal in utter darkness.
Blind Kal tried to activate his mana sight but before he could he slammed into something, knocking him spinning again. His body was far stronger than the last time had fallen so he took almost no damage from the collision but he felt something piercing his leg. He didn’t have enough time to worry about that though before he finally hit the bottom.
He landed with a hard wet splat, lucky it wasn’t Kal’s body that made the noise but whatever disgusting gorefiend mess he had just fallen into. His thigh burning from the wound Kal got to his feet and scanned the place he had fallen into.
The place was pitch black without his mana sight but with it, it was a storm of crimson mana marbled with a sickly green. Kal immediately didn’t like the look of it. It looked like the reverse of passages beneath the plateau. There he could see the walls by the absence of mana but here the walls squirmed with the stuff. He could see a passage in front of him but it was by no means a normal-looking passage. It was pulsating, or contracting, like the slow tensing of muscles, shrinking the passage slightly before it stretched back out again.
Kal began to conjure a crimson flame to his hand so that he could actually see the area around him but as the flame came to his hand the mana in the walls began to churn but even worse, so did the flesh of his thigh.