“Okay alright. With Derek here, we can start for real. Artemis, would you be so kind as to call up the map, and give us some basic background on what’s happening?” Brennan said, turning his chair to the side to look at the wall behind him.
Artemis walked to the same wall, fiddled with something, and a magic illusion of a map sprang into existence just off the surface of the wall. Derek recognized it as what he thought of as “the big little map”, one that captured not the entire continent or world, but still showed more than a single town or city. It showed the capitol, where they were, as well as the five or six settlements most closely associated with the capitol. It was the regional map Derek was most familiar with.
Artemis, being a scout, had several skills related to the reading and manipulation of maps. She pointed her finger at several points on the map, magically highlighting them with arrows and labelling the same with Ra’Zorian numbers.
“As of today’s date, we would normally wait another week before running our usual inspection and delivery pattern to the various settlements. Usually, we’d visit these five settlements, check on their wellbeing, scout their surroundings, and make sure they were safe until our next support sweep.”
Brennan stirred in his chair, raising his hand and saving Derek from having to make the decision between doing so himself and maybe making a fool of himself, or sitting still and not understanding what was going on.
“I’m assuming plans have changed. Did something happen to one of the settlements?”
“Yes, or at least it’s possible. As you know, communication between settlements and the capital is difficult, and only relatively powerful mages with a communication focus can handle the distance and demonic interference. Thus, most settlement-to-capitol communications happen via the settlement’s communication orb and receiving facilities in the capitol.”
She waved her hand, highlighting the fifth of the five colonies.
“Because the orbs also handle routine correspondence when they aren’t tied up in official functions, communications are coming through fairly constantly, at least during daytime hours. But as of this morning, Epsilon Colony’s communications didn’t pick up again as expected, not even for the typical morning ‘all clear’ and check-in.”
Now, Derek did raise his hand. “Is that necessarily bad? If they only had a single method of communication, it could just be an equipment malfunction. Stuff like this has happened before.”
Artemis paused, then nodded. “Yes, actually. We’ve seen breaks in communications for a number of reasons in the past, with reasons ranging from equipment breakdown related to the orbs, demon-driven plagues knocking down the personnel who are trained to handle the orbs, and just good old-fashioned interference. More often than not, breaks in communications don’t signal a catastrophe.”
She gestured towards the map again, highlighting three other settlements that were more or less between the capital and the communications-compromised settlement.
“That’s why we are considering this break important, but not an absolute emergency. Several reincarnator heroes are posted in that settlement. They are not our absolute best, but are all dependable veterans of the war. Whatever the problem they face, Epsilon was built with defense in mind and should be able to hold out against most threats for some time. At the same time, we have an interest in not fully letting this trip go to waste. Without getting into excessive details, each of these three settlements has communicated some semi-vital need related to re-supply or suspicious activity that needs to be scouted or cleared. Fulfilling each of these needs represents no more than three hours of commitment once we get to each location, on top of additional travel time.”
Brennan stood and walked over to the map, his lips moving as he did some quick mental travel time computation. “So what’s the overall time to get there? 20 hours?”
“Less, I think, if we keep our team down to just you and me, and maybe one other member as a wildcard. I can just about keep up with you in terms of travel speed, and for most problems, you're more than enough to supplement a settlement’s existing resources. Which brings us to the main point of our meeting.”
She turned to Derek, a wry half-grin on her face. “How fast can you run?”
—
It turned out Derek could run fast enough. While it wasn't anywhere near either Brennan’s or Artemis’ skill-buffed top speeds, his STAM stat was high enough at this point that he just didn’t actually tire. When the other two got within the margins of safety reserves they maintained in terms of stamina resources, he was still going strong and would catch up.
His lungs and legs might have been screaming, but it turned out that trying to keep up with two elites in an actual, real-life field situation did wonders for stat acquisition. He had picked up one DEX and two VIT points since leaving home.
The settlements they had visited on the way had not been particularly hard to deal with. Two of the three just needed deliveries, and only the last had any kind of combat-related issue. There, a few hives of demon wasps had set up shop in the woods outside of the town. The town's heroes could have dealt with it themselves, but it was safer to just have Brennan do it. They didn’t have to leave the town partially unguarded while they fought and if it was an ambush situation, Derek’s team could then lead the ambushers back to a fully defended fortress-town. Where humans could take advantage of those kinds of mechanics, they usually did.
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Derek’s own contributions to the fight had been pretty minimal. The wasps were numerous, but they weren’t strong. The main danger that they posed was their numbers. A couple of the wasps that made it through the initial carnage would seek revenge after their main colonies were destroyed. So Derek had been assigned to a sort of secondary straggler-roundup position, working to attract and destroy any wasps that Artemis’s arrows didn’t get to first. He had picked up an STR point from jumping high into the air to get to one, so it wasn’t a total loss, but it also wasn’t exactly defending the entire world against mortal peril.
After leaving that settlement, it had been more of the same. The few points Derek had picked up meant he could keep up better, although the stat increases weren’t coming as hot and heavy as before, either. He patted himself on the back for keeping up with the elites before Brennan and Artemis subtly increased their running pace, revealing they had been keeping quite a bit in reserve.
“Okay, almost there. We need to be a little careful as we cross over the next rise, Derek. Keep your eyes peeled. You don’t have any ambush-preventative skills, correct?”
“I don’t have any skills at all.” Derek was used to Brennan asking about skills, when he should have been fully aware that Derek couldn’t possess such things. He wasn’t exactly a detail-oriented person, which is likely part of why he and Artemis were such a good fit together. “But my reflexes in general are pretty good. I get an awful lot out of DEX and PER, these days.”
The days when Derek could rely on his sword lighting up with magic of some kind or another and doing most of the work for him were long gone. This wasn’t exactly a loss, since his Common Man class got so much out of each stat point. In essence, it was like working with a permanent semi-buff. If he was up against another opponent who had similar stats but was completely out of stamina, mana, or whatever other resource they might use, he’d steamroll them. But when he had to deal with system-augmented abilities with nothing but good-old-fashioned training and stat-based movement, it got tricky.
“Oh, right.” Brennan scratched his head. “Well, the deal is that the main reincarnator defender of this town is a Turretter. It’s a class built to defend stable positions, so the walls of the town themselves are basically one big weapon. But he also sometimes hides smaller ambush traps to pick off enemies as they come. Artemis and I are whitelisted, so we should be fine.”
“But I might be a default kill-on-sight?”
“Something like that. My guess is that you'll be fine because you are with us, but those turrets are no joke. I once had to deflect an arbalest bolt from one, and it ended up throwing me back like a quarter mile. I recommend dodging instead.”
Derek tried to imagine how Brennan had managed to deflect something as big and strong as a siege bolt when he was a strength-light precision-fighting class for a few moments. But, he gave up when they actually crested the rise and saw the smoldering, scorched-earth remains of Epsilon Colony.
Derek hadn’t been on a lot of field missions, but it didn’t take a lot of experience to know this wasn’t the average experience. Especially not with the tough-as-nails Artemis collapsing in tears to the ground only a few steps ahead of him.
—
Minutes later, Artemis had managed to pull herself together, replacing her tears with a tightly set, determined expression. After that, it was just a matter of a minute or so to sprint down to the town. There wasn’t much left there to see, beyond the scattered stones of the wall and a few surviving sturdy stone pillars that had once supported entire buildings. Everywhere else, there was ash. Thick, choking ash that kicked up off the ground as they walked, covering everything.
Derek tried not to think of how much of that ash was, until very recently, the inhabitants of the town.
“What could even do this, Brennan?”
Brennan frowned, looking at the readouts of various analysis skills he seemed to have running. One of the advantages of his class was that he could learn about enemy attacks he might face from almost any way of observing them one could imagine, including looking at the aftermath of them.
“I have no idea. But whatever it was, it happened in an instant. This was one attack, Artemis.”
“THIS?” Artemis yelled, swinging her arm at the destruction behind her. “This entire town was leveled with one attack? One?”
Brennan nodded. “Unless my skill is wrong. I can’t analyze what happened here. It's not telling me how to block this kind of attack. But it is treating it as one attack, one skill. It’s not like a battlefield. It’s like someone hit this with a precision strike from space, or something.”
Artemis tore her gaze from the smoldering town and wheeled around on Brennan. “That doesn’t even make sense, Brennan. What could even…”
She suddenly stopped, looked and Brennan’s face, and turned here eyes up towards the hills around the town. Seeing this, Derek did the same.
There were demons. Thousands of them, ringing the entire valley the settlement stood in. It was an ambush.
—
Thirty minutes later, they finally broke out of the battlefield, covered in blood. It had mostly been Brennan’s doing, using his full suite of precision skills to keep enemies away until they found a weak spot in the encircling forces and cut through it. Derek hadn’t helped much in the fight, the most he did was paper over some minute errors in Brennan’s technique by finishing off enemies he had already mostly gutted or crippled with pinpoint strikes. He comforted himself by noting that Artemis had been in about the same boat.
He was embarrassed to recall how he had dreamed of overtaking Brennan, thinking he’d be able to do so if he could just go on a few real missions. It turned out the gap between them was less like the wall he had imagined, and more like trying to build a bridge over the Grand Canyon.
“Where are we going?” Brennan huffed. It was much easier to keep up with him now. He was covered in wounds to the point where he was significantly slowed. If they had a chance to escape, it was going to be Artemis’s scouting that would do it, not sheer speed.
“You aren’t going to like it.”
“Just tell me.”
“We have to circle back and go into demon territory. It’s the only way.”
“What? Why?”
“I’ve been analyzing their tracks. Somewhere along the line, we set off some kind of magical alert that called them back to this battle, but before they started chasing us, they must have been headed towards other settlements. There’s a literal army between us and friends.”
“We can’t cut through?”
“Not injured like you are. There’s too many of them.” There was no question in Artemis’s voice. Derek watched Brennan accept it, then move on.
“You think we will do better in enemy territory?”
“Probably. They won’t expect it. And with a force that big, they probably didn’t leave very many forces in reserve.”
“Derek? Thoughts?” Brennan could have easily forgotten Derek, but didn’t. He was part of the team, it turned out, and Brennan was treating him like an adult.
“If it’s our best chance, it’s our best chance. I’ll do what you two recommend.”
No more words were exchanged. They veered. An hour later, they crossed over into the blood-tinted wasteland of the demons’ territory.