Two weeks later…
The five man band were making their way through the Gentle Forest. Though they were still some fifty klicks away from Pine’s Prairie, already the forest had thinned considerably. A hundred meters ahead, Ezekiel scouted out the easiest path through the burgeoning underbrush still green under the unseasonably warm autumn sun. Though they were all [Celestials], before the tier up at level 50 of the Race, [Celestials] generally were unable to sustain flight over long distances. As a result, with the rolling hills underneath the forest, the group moved with a mixture of pedestrian walking and short hop flights.
Far from any settlement of the Celeri Empire, but still within its notional boundaries, patrolling ranger squads helped keep the hinterlands free of bandits, smugglers, aggressive beasts, the occasional [Eldritch], and—worse of all—the occasional merchant evading import taxes.
Well, only when it was exciting.
This patrol had been routine. Long sequences of hiking, camping under the stars, and only two pursuits of note. It was good honest work fulfilling in its own way.
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As the sun finally set, the campfire had already calmed down to hot embers, a hearty stew of rehydrated meat, some fresh roots foraged nearby, and too much herb was simmering away. High above the campfire, the pentacle had already set up their roosting tents in the branches of the trees above.
With a quick rustle of wing, [Mage] Dina fluttered down to the fire and pulled out a whistling tea kettle, then nearly as quick flew back up to a large bough the group were using as common space. Ezekiel and Araqiel were locked into a fierce, but silent game of cards, as Adoel and Machidiel made small talk.
“—and this is why they need to reconsider the standard mess kit. It’s entirely unacceptable that we’re out here for six, eight weeks at a time and living in these conditions. Right?” Machidiel argued. Then, turning around, “Dina, what do you think?”
“About what?” Dina asked politely as the tea cups jostled in her hand. She began pouring as Machidiel opened his mouth to explain, but Adoel interrupted with her finger in his mouth.
“Mack thinks that the cooking gear ought to be enchanted to be self-heating. Save the hassle of a campfire and the risk of being spotted at a distance at night.”
Dina bit her bottom lip as she handed a cup to Machidiel and Adoel. “As much as I would enjoy having something interesting to study, I have to agree with Ada. A campfire is very soothing, and it’s not just the warmth. Plus I like the flavor it imparts to dinner.”
Adoel smacked Machidiel in the chest. “That’s what I said! What’s the point of being out in the wilderness if you can’t enjoy a good campfire. Roughing it out and—” Adoel snapped her head to the right hard enough that it startled Dina. Adoel’s eyes focused into the descending blackness of the night, looking off to an unseeable horizon.
“Shit! [Eldritch].”
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The squad slept fitfully that night. After an early and heavy breakfast the next day, they set off at a light jog, significantly to the left of their prior heading. Though relatively stationary, the Skill feedback that Adoel received showed that a small group of [Eldritch] were about forty kilometers out, right near the notional border. After five hours, the group stopped to lunch and rest and prepare for battle. Tensions were high, but the team was prepared and it wouldn’t be their first [Eldritch] kill.
But no sooner had they started moving out again that Adoel started cursing up a storm.
Huddling back up, Adoel just calmed down enough to say something reasonably coherent.
“There’s a second return on the Skill,” she paused briefly to let it sink in. “There are more [Eldritch].”
“Where?”
“About 55 kilometers out on the same heading.”
“Zeke, where would that put us?” Araqiel asked, as Ezekiel pulled out a map from a waterproof tube.
“Hmm, probably on an offshoot of Pine’s Prairie. Before the savannah, but well outside the border.”
“How far outside?”
“Mmm, twenty-five, maybe thirty kilometers. Depends.”
“Can you tell if it’s a singleton or a group?”
“No idea. It feels lesser than the signal that brought us here, but this far out, it’s a crapshoot.”
Araqiel hummed briefly before speaking. “This doesn’t change our battle plan. Let’s focus on this one here and now, and then we’ll think it over. The [Captain] wouldn’t particularly care about something over the border, but if it’s [Eldritch],” Araqiel made a vague shrugging motion.
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Ezekiel didn’t breathe as he peered around the wide oak tree he was hiding behind. The forest here was suddenly a little thicker, but there was still good visibility for about five hundred or so meters before the forest blended it all away and out of sight.
And three hundred meters away, were three [Eldritch]. Though Ezekiel wasn’t concerned about the fight, just seeing the matte black creatures—seemingly amalgamations of every creepy crawly he knew and some he didn’t—was enough to curdle his insides.
Ripping away from the sight, Ezekiel quickly skittered his way back fifty meters and over a ridge. Dropping down to where his team was hiding, Ezekiel made his report.
“Report,” Araqiel ordered.
“Three [Eldritch]. [Long-Range Identify] put them at relatively modest levels of 25, 27, and 31. No obvious major deviations from within standard bodyforms for [Eldritch].”
“Hmm, not bad, but still. Here’s what we’re going to do...”
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To the particularly observant, the [Eldritch] were acting oddly. While perhaps an [Eldritch] under level 10 might consider killing the local plantlife, such [Eldritch] were more speculative than actual reality. Instead, all [Eldritch] actively sought out all animal life larger than a rat and were particularly fond of seeking out nearby sapient life.
These [Eldritch], though, were not. Rather, they were relatively motionless and, daresay, docile, walking around in the same triangular path over and over again, wearing the underbrush down by their passage.
Bhom! Pwssh!
The relative silence of the forest was broken by a [Divine]-infused arrow, followed closely behind by a [Divine] spell, crashing into the foremost [Eldritch] obliterating most of its body. The other two let loose a maddening warble, then began crashing through the underbrush into the direction where the attacks came from.
Adoel in turn charged back at them, [Taunting] them and focusing their attention on her. As she braced herself, she hunkered down behind her shield as she held a small mace close to her body to make any opportunistic strikes. Around the right side of the field of engagement, Araqiel ran/hopped/flew ten meters up along the sides of several trees, before [Diving] down to attack one of the [Eldritch]—codename Bob—with his skills. Dina meanwhile had conjured one [Firewall] to keep the second [Eldritch]—codename Charlie—away from Araqiel, and was now just [Flamethrowering] Charlie. Though fire was less effective against the [Eldritch] than [Divine] Skills, they only had the one [Cleric] and none of the rest of them had an adjacent Class, such as [Paladin], [Monk] or [Vicar]. But Dina was a bit older, stronger, and more experienced than the rest of them, and at these lower levels, she was wearing Charlie down quickly.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
A second [Divine]-infused arrow came rocketing out from the bushes and struck into Bob. With that and Araqiel’s attacks,
> Ding! You have killed an [Eldritch] (L27).
With only one enemy left, Dina nixed the [Firewall] and switched her attacks from the wide-effect [Flamethrower] to the far more precise [Firebolt], loosing them thrice per second at Charlie. As she did so, Araqiel cleared the wall of smoke that remained and attacked Charlie from behind, his blade a blur as he carved Charlie’s flesh from his endoskeleton, kilogram by kilogram. Even Adoel got into the action, using her throwing maces to get some brute force concussive damage onto Charlie’s “front.” Finally, from the bushes, came a whoosh of golden light, and
> Ding! You have killed an [Eldritch] (L31).
Textbook [Eldritch] takedown.
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Two hours later, the patrol was resting a klick away from the burning pyres with the [Eldritch]. Despite their high mood earlier, they were somber now as their bodies unwound, chewing on a bit of stew quickly put together. They ate in silence.
“Ada,” Araqiel murmured.
Adoel snorted a booger back up her nose, seemingly oblivious to Araqiel’s address. She spooned another piece of meat into her mouth, chewing it slowly and swallowing it deliberately. “Yeah?” she finally responded.
“What’s your Skill saying.”
“Same signal as before,” she replied thoughtfully, stirring her stew a little. “About 48 kilometers out from here, and well past the border.”
“Well, shit,” Ezekiel interjected.
“Well shit, indeed,” Araqiel agreed. “Dina? Any idea what the protocol here is?”
Dina shook her head lightly as she stared at the bottom of her bowl, using a simple flatbread to scrape up some of the good stuff. “There’s no protocol. In all my prior patrols, if we detected an [Eldritch] it was killed, full stop. But I don’t think any of them had a detection range beyond twenty klicks, and patrols almost always stay that far in from the border.” She bit into the last piece of now-soaked carbohydrate. “So there’s no protocol because it’s never come up before; wasn’t supposed to ever come up.” Dina glanced over at Adoel. “Seems like sometimes a Skill can be too good, hmm?”
“Hmm. We have orders to kill all [Eldritch] we detect. We don’t actually have orders not to cross the border, but that’s somewhat implied. There’s not even another nation that way, it’s wilderness anyhow,” Araqiel tapped the side of his bowl with his spoon as he was deep in thought. “I think… I think we go anyways.”
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The following day, the patrol squad continued along the heading as the forest gave way to boreal prairie—high grasses, roaming herds of herbivores, and slow rolling hills. As they moved farther from the forest—now well outside imperial territory—the hue of the grasslands slowly shifted from a verdant green to a more golden khaki. Despite the lack of trees or cover, they moved relatively quickly with a low profile, and by the late afternoon, had killed the surprisingly inanimate [Eldritch] (L28) Adoel had detected earlier.
No sooner had the [Eldritch] given its expiring wail then Adoel triggered her Skill and cursed up another storm. Another return a few degrees from the prior heading and 52 kilometers away. Another suppertime discussion. Another decision. And they were off yet again.
And by early afternoon of the next day, the team had killed an oddly stationary [Eldritch] (L29). Another trigger of the Skill. Another return. Another meeting. Another path.
And so the team fell into an increasingly distressing rhythm as they followed and slaughtered this line of bizarre [Eldritch].
On the fifth day outside imperial lands, the outfit killed their fifth [Eldritch], this time in the foothills of a mountain range none of them admitted to knowing the name of. Trees had returned now, at least at the base of the mountains where the soil was still soft and the water more plentiful, but the mountains themselves were scraggly, two kilometer high brutes, sharp and threatening. At nearly two hundred and fifty kilometers past the border, the comfort of the more familiar terrain was overshadowed by the surreal events of the past week and the subtle variations in the local ecology that made it clear they were far from home.
The team stood around anxiously as Adoel triggered her Skill and began filtering through the sensual return the Skill provided her. They stayed quiet, if tense, as Adoel focused, her forehead creased in concentration. The silence strayed long.
“Well?!” Ezekiel snapped, then (suddenly self-aware) muttered an apology under his breath.
“Ada?” Dina asked quietly.
Adoel opened her eyes at last and absently scratched her smooth chin for several moments, before sighing. “There’s another return. But… it feels different.”
“Different how?” Araqiel rumbled.
“Closer. A lot closer. Maybe only fifteen kilometers in as the [Eagle] flies. And bigger. A lot bigger. Assuming the same strength, then maybe 20 or 25 of the bastards. Or maybe 10 at level 40. Five at level 50. Or some mix I can’t really discern from here.”
“You’re sure?” Araqiel asked, quirking an eyebrow. Then at Adoel’s glance, sighed himself. “That’s a powerful group. I’m not sure the Empire’s seen an attack that large in the last century.”
“Arrakash Province. 532 New Imperial Calendar. Eighty-thousand dead,” Dina whispered.
Araqiel picked a piece of stiff grass and nibbled on it gently as he thought it through, the simple physicality of the act distracting him from the distressing conclusions he was reaching. He began to pace, his team otherwise silent. After a few minutes, he stopped and turned to Machidiel. “Mack, you’ve been awfully silent the last week.”
Machidiel raised an eyebrow at that. “Yes, and?”
“What do you think of the situation?” he asked, as the rest of the team turned their attention to watch the two.
Machidiel made a show of glancing at each of his teammates, the fingers and thumb of one hand ticking as he made some silent calculations. Finally, he spoke. “91 in 100 times, we all die and at least a quarter of the [Eldritch] survive. 7 in 100, at least one of us survives the battle, but either I die or I don’t have enough MP to heal effectively, which means we’re likely still dead or I’m the only survivor. The last 2 in 100, we somehow manage two or more survivors.” Machidiel paused for several seconds. “With those odds, our main priority should be returning and reporting this. We’re so far out of bounds that if we wipe, the Empire won’t ever find this… nest? Let’s call it a nest. The Empire may ultimately decide not to act, but that’s someone else’s call to make. And maybe there’s an analyst or professor who can make heads or tails of this strange line of semi-benign [Eldritch]. Given we killed them, we need to report that too. Ara?”
Araqiel grunted. “That’s about what I thought too,” he stated, leaving out that he was only thinking of the odds as X in 10. “Engagement is both suicide and futile. Report is primary goal. But, the question remains whether to scout for higher precision.”
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Ezekiel was trying hard not to piss himself as he scrambled up the edge of a last ridge. Ada had said the [Eldritch] were relatively tightly packed just past it, and Ezekiel had been sent out for visual and [Identify] confirmation. The lack of trees or even any bushes taller than waist-height meant his obscuration Skills were likely useless, and he’d have to rely on his Attributes and his guile to keep from being detected.
As he neared the top, he fell to his knees and elbows, tucking his wings down tight as he crept the last ten meters forward and slightly up to the crest of the ridge, angled towards a smallish boulder he hoped would break up his profile.
As his eyes crept over the ridgeline and down into the rocky valley below, he caught a glimpse of the first [Eldritch]. Despite having killed many over the past two years—and half of those in the past week—he still found himself steeling himself from gasping, squealing, freaking out, or one of any number of things that would lead to his quick and untimely demise.
But, he kept his breath under control, and 13 quick [Identifies] later, he began the slow creep away from his death.
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“A (Level 54), four (Level 41), and eight (Level 30).”
“Huh,” Araqiel grunted. “A mix. And even worse than we thought. Anything else noteworthy?”
“They were … kind of in a circle. The (Level 54) was in the center, but the rest formed a loose ring about a hundred meters across. Almost like when you’d see [Guardsmen] around a [Minister] or high profile figure.”
Araqiel rubbed his face with both hands in frustration. “Ugh, this sits so wrong with me. Mack, buff all of us. We’ll be exhausted, but I want to fly and put as much distance between us and them as we can in the next two hours.”
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