"Sir Gregor!!"

"Master!"

"We have not expected a visit, Sir!"

  Surprised shouts of three men greeted Gregor and Frei when they entered yet another guard tower, their eyes widening when they saw Frei with his dark purple hair. A second later a fourth man joined them and they kept blinking their eyes nervously from Gregor to Frei, uneasy due to their unexpected visit.

"Just shut up and call me simply Gregor, have you noticed anything odd lately?" Gregor asked, not bothering with formalities, he had bigger trouble on his hands at this time.

  They had inspected two towers on the first night and decided to stay in the second one during the day. The following night they had checked another two, this was their third night and this tower was their sixth, the sun was just about to peek from behind the hills in the east when they had entered this tower.

The first tower with no signs of a massacre inside, the culprit always the same, forest monsters.

"Not at all, no signs of an enemy, Sir." One of the men answered immediately.

"What about animals? Any weird behavior?" Gregor insisted, looking at the man's surprised face.

"Animals? We have not seen many of them as of late." One of them shrugged, apparently not bothered much by animals' routines.

"Five towers along the border had been assaulted by forest animals, their garrison killed. This tower is the first with living personnel inside." Gregor said and the atmosphere turned heavy, some of the crew gasping with shock. "If there is anything you have noticed, tell me, even if it is something seemingly unrelated."

  This time, all of them began thinking earnestly, as their very lives depended on whether they would be able to solve the mystery of the assaulted guard towers.

"Maybe. .. " One of them began to speak, but did not have the courage to continue when Gregor looked at him with his stern glare.

"Actually, Ron has not returned from the hunt, but he does this sometimes when he is angry. We ignore it, because he is our best hunter." The leader of the small crew said, uneasy about what Gregor's reaction would be.

"Show me his personal belongings." Gregor barked, not pleased that he had to dig out the answers out of the clearly incompetent crew.

"Yes, Sir!" What they lacked in competence, they were trying to make up for with boot licking and quickly led them to the place where Ron slept.

  Frei ogled the rest of the party, leaving the investigation to Gregor, who had certainly more experience concerning leadership. Yet, it was not fated to be and Gregor shortly threw him a piece of wrinkled paper with some words on it.

"Does it make any sense to you?" Gregor asked and Frei read the note.

  Today, all someone personnel ate garrisoned half at rations the again eastern and guard I tower am Six honestly will fed be up relieved with of it duty. I at will the have beginning to of hunt winter longer as tomorrow per to usual feed you the will glutton, receive it your would pay not from have your been superiors a stationed problem at if the things Waldorf around Castle here on were the normal fifth, but day lately of I the have first this winter uneasy month feeling like someone is watching me and the animals around the tower are more scarce day by day.

  What a gibberish! He was not a one ounce smarter after reading the note. Still, his ego did not want him to admit defeat right away and he continued to stare at the note for a minute, trying to decipher its meaning.

"There are two messages mixed together!" Frei said, exhilarated by his great wisdom.

Well, honestly it was the most lame and easy cipher imaginable, but it did not take away his glee, despite it was most likely just a scribble made out of boredom.

"What is its content?" All of them looked at Frei as if he was some kind of a famous detective, when actually they just had not paid the message enough attention.

  He told them the contents of the two messages. One of them was just some random order and the other sounded like torn out of a personal diary, the second message verified that soon, this tower may welcome an unexpected party of animal visitors.

"We will fortify the tower, they will come." Gregor decided without delay and the rest of the tower's crew began running around with maximum alertness and inefficiency doing what they considered should be performed to reinforce the tower's defenses.

  Only now had Frei the presence of mind to look at the tower's interior. it had only a few pieces of furniture they could use to barricade the door, but he had been surprised how many miscellaneous things everyone managed to pile up in an attempt to thwart the potential attack.

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"This will be a hassle." He sighed while willing the quest log to appear, but to no avail, leaving him staring at the blank wall in front of him.

Why was he not even surprised?

  He had already confirmed that Gabri'El was present in this world, meaning all kinds of beings had found out about this new failure of a universe and started pouring in, eager to grab what they could. By the nature of Gabri'El's trouble, the souls he had amassed had definitely faced the same fate as his own, devoured by the ravenous young universe, stripping him of his power to fuel its growth.

  Frei remembered that the scientist had said that the universe needed material, some information matrix and souls to power it. His guess was that the more souls the Fabled Universe snatched, the more defined it became, not relying so much on the game elements anymore.

  He could also be completely wrong and the reason was something entirely different. One way or the other, he could not see his quests anymore and due to the fact that the level ups did not seem to affect stats, it would be hard to detect if the old mechanics still worked behind the scenes. He decided to try and stay alive under Victor for the moment and the truth should reveal itself with time.

Well, if Victor's claws would not reveal his carotid arteries sooner.

  Frei's brooding had been interrupted by an ominous moment of silence, he would have considered it impossible unless he felt it for himself. Inside of the tower, everyone around him was quiet and he noticed that there was the sound of footsteps and rustling vegetation coming from behind the door, he immediately pictured a swarm of animals making their way through the bushes in his mind.

"Hold the door! I will attack them from above." Gregor whispered hastily and began climbing to the top of the guard tower, while Frei's eyes snapped back at the door that was barricaded with two beds and some other odds and ends, whatever the men deemed sufficiently heavy to provide some degree of reinforcement.

  In no time, Frei heard the first whines and howls from the outside that were followed by furious scratching on the door. The heavy wooden planks held off the attack with ease, supported by all the furniture that had been piled up against them and Frei was still able to just sit and watch the futile efforts of the wolves outside. The premature assault had clearly been triggered by Gregor who was attacking the beasts from above with arrows and whatever other means he had at his disposal.

"It seems that we have been too careful, what a pathetic attack." Frei snorted, but shortly after, he heard panicked shouts from above.

"AGHHHH . . ."  

"Noel, what are you doing?!"

  There was a commotion at the top and soon, Gregor followed by one man of the garrison almost fell down the ladder, that was how fast they were climbing back to the ground floor. Gregor was the last and closed the hatch behind him, barring it with a wooden plank.

"The eyes! The eyes! The eyes. . .glowing eyes!" The man kept repeating something while trembling, it was clear that he was heavily shaken by what had just happened on the top floor of the guard tower.

"Shut up!" Gregor reprimanded him nervously and glanced at Frei. "There is some kind of a wraith outside, I have never heard of a similar fucker in my life."

Frei saw that even Gregor was uneasy after the experience and gave him a moment to calm down, expecting to hear the rest of the story after he had collected himself.

"They just saw the eyes and then. . . their movements turned dull, they stabbed Steven from behind and were about to kill me." Fre unexpectedly received the response from the shaken man who was most likely the only one still alive from the original garrison crew.

"Right, avoid its eyes, but it is not incorporeal. We should be safe here." Gregor added and unconsciously licked the blood that had stained his left hand.

"Wait, you have never seen this, wraith, before?" Frei asked finding it strange that a seasoned scout like Gregor had no knowledge of a monster that they found deep in the vampire territory.

"No, I have never seen anything like it, nor heard about a similar monster." Gregor shook his head quickly. "Normal wraiths should not be here and they are incorporeal. This one looks like a zombie, but its abilities are closer to a wraith."

". . . and it can control only with one look." Frei stated flatly, his face grim.

"Right, there has to be some condition, but I do not know what it is." Gregor sat down on top of one of the beds that had not been used to bar the door and pressed his back against the wall, the remaining man following his example.

"Do you think that ability works even on vampires?" Frei asked a million dollar question, but his vampire companion just shrugged and kept staring on the floor.

"It is tough, usually a wraith can be killed easily with spells, but this one took a few hits from me without any significant damage. To kill it, we would need to get close, but it uses all the controlled monsters as a shield." Gregor explained in a monotonous voice.

They kept sitting a few minutes in a suffocating silence that had been interrupted by the noises of something nibbling on the wood of the trapdoor above them.

"They are trying bite their way through!" Frei and Gregor jumped to their legs at the same time and rushed to the ladder in the middle of the small space, but they were too late, a cracking noise announcing that the rotten trapdoor of the old tower had already succumbed to the furious attempts of the invaders. Something began to swiftly climb down the ladder and both of them looked what it was only to see what Gregor had previously described.

  It looked like a zombie with its eyes shining bright yellow, but had a surprisingly robust body for a monster that fought indirectly using its minions, its height being roughly two and a half meters. The abomination was looking at Gregor and when Frei looked at him as well, he saw that his eyes turned white, his movements becoming stiff. Gregor turned to face him and lifted his sword above his head while giant spiders began crawling down the walls.

They were the ones that had climbed up the tower and broken through the trapdoor.

"What a cheat!" Frei hissed and used his blade as a mirror to see the wraith's legs disappear back in the opening left behind after the broken trapdoor. The monster performed a quick strategic retreat, leaving all the controlled puppets to deal with Frei in its stead.

Frei could only curse and focus his attention back on Gregor who was already almost directly in front of him. Slowly backing off while trying to will any kind of interface into existence with little luck, he tried to remember some useful spell to use in the situation.

"There is Shroud that can make me less conspicuous and that spell that can darken the paint on green tea cups and . . . " He did not need to continue to strain his brain to understand that he had nothing useful up his sleeve.

"He has nothing green on him, I am finished." Frei mumbled and tripped over the bed standing next to the barred door.