As a shiver ran down her spine, Lyrhea shot a short, cursory glance over her shoulder. She had endured enough to know that this feeling was not merely her mind playing tricks on her; there was someone watching, though for what reason she could not say.
Despite this, she and the rest of her gang of misfits, Lyrhean and human alike, made their way deeper into the ruined city. Occasionally, Lyrhea would halt their march to review the information provided to her by the Primordial Serpent, altering the path taken and shifting the goal by anywhere from a few kilometers to a few tens of miles.
Despite that, they were nearing their desired destination, and after a few more days of walking and after finally leaving the ruined city behind them for a few tens of miles, the big snake god spoke to Lyrhea once again.
[“You have arrived at your destination. Please leave a rating to help the algorithm determine the-… What?”]
As the Primordial Serpent cracked a joking and snarky remark, Lyrhea merely shook her head and sighed.
“So, the Patron of my people moonlights as a GPS?”
The rumble of a God’s laughter shook the first Lyrhean nearly to the ground.
[“I do what I want, and who are you to tell me otherwise? Just be grateful I got you to this place as fast as I did.”]
“Yes, my Primeval master.” Lyrhea replied in an annoyed tone, only to be forced to the ground by her Patron.
[“If you want that to stop happening every time you get on my bad side, you might want to get a bit stronger, eh?”]
And with that, the God’s presence vanished, leaving Lyrhea to pick herself up off the ground. She looked back at the others, and to her joy found that none had seen her face be planted into the ground by a rather bipolar deity.
Walking back to the makeshift camp she quickly made her way over to her ‘daughters’. Since the long trek had began, she had added another 2 True Lyrheans to her entourage, though she did feel that the losses taken by her new cult of humans in order to do this was regrettable.
Their names were Nahlkeht and Grensadra, and they were already powerful before they became what they now were, but after their resurrection and transformation, they were made even stronger.
Nahlkeht was what could essentially be called a cross between what the P*thfinder games would call an Alchemist and an Inquisitor. More specifically, she was one who focused on brewing and using potion-bombs and utilizing powerful but temporary mutations that would drastically and violently reshape her body, though only for a few moments.
For Nahlkeht the pain of using these body-altering abilities was immense, but the combat and utility functions these temporary mutations provided more than made up for it, and chugging a few potions designed to act as a pain-blocker always made things easier, even if the after-effects would be a bitch when the potion wore off.
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Grensadra, on the other hand, took more of a Bard-type function, buffing her allies and debuffing enemies, though to be brutally honest she was the type of Bard that wasn’t exactly useless in melee or ranged combat but was, at best, mediocre, though that was to be expected. She did, though, have the neat little bonus of being able to control her voice to such a degree that she could blow a man’s eardrums at 30 paces with a single, focused, precision scream, but that was the best she could do with her voice as a weapon thus far.
When that final, fifth True Lyrhean was added to the gang, Lyrhea’s quest finally, at long fucking last, updated. She was then forced immediately into the final stage of the tutorial, and it had been bugging her for over a week now, assaulting her endlessly every time she woke up from a rather fitful sleep.
That was one of the reasons why she was so thrilled to finally be at the place that her Patron had tasked her with reaching, though she still had no god damned idea how to work this new ‘feature’ that she was tasked by the tutorial with using.
As she sat down by the fire with her ‘daughters’, she looked out and around. She was in a rather defensible position, high above the surrounding area atop a plateau that could only be reached by using a set of slopes that ran down to another plateau and then down to another and then, and only then, down to the rough ground around that position.
As she sat in silent contemplation, with the alert from the final stage of the Tutorial constantly blaring inside of her head, she was alerted to the presence of a handful of Lesser Lyrheans running up to her position. She turned her head and watched as the seventeen Lesser Lyrheans knelt on the grass and bowed their heads. She was hopefully never going to get used to this kind of sycophantic behavior, and hopefully it would end eventually anyways.
“Speak.”
With Lyrhea’s single word, one of the Lesser Lyrheans lifted his gaze to her and nodded.
“We have finished our scouting of the area and we have discovered several areas that could be exploited for resources.”
“Such as?”
The Lesser Lyrhean paused for a moment to evaluate in his mind exactly which resource deserved to be first to be presented, but he eventually settled on an order to list them in.
“Firstly there is ample wood and wildlife, as well as a decent number of food and feed crops nearby, though many would need to be replanted and taken care of.” He hoped that would be a good first step, for a nation could not live for long on an empty stomach. “Next, there are numerous places where stone and some metals can be extracted with proper work and effort, and the caves that run through this greater plateau lead to several more deposits.”
“Anything truly valuable?” Lyrhea asked, not expecting much.
“Aside from copper, tin, and iron, no, not really. We are lucky enough to have all these metals and materials, to begin with. Truly, you have chosen our home well, Great Mother.”
“Then start gathering materials and come the morning I’ll see if I can’t get the last part of my Tutorial over with.” Lyrhea said, waving the Lesser Lyrheans away. She gazed out into the night and swiped the alert from her gaze again, only for it to come back up.
Hopefully, this would be the last night that she had to deal with that bullshit.