After a couple of hours spent recuperating Aaron started moving through the bodies to search for any loot to take and I stood to join him.
“Any idea where the monster core is?” Aaron asked once I joined him at the corpse of the large hobgoblin.
“Well, I assume it’s where ours is, right?” I answered somewhat uncomfortably. The intelligence I had seen in the awakened monsters eyes made me feel like it was less of a monster than the regular dungeon creatures we fought.
“Yeah, I guess,” Aaron responded and cut into the goblins stomach. A moment later he pulled out a bloody brown monster core, similar to the one I remembered awakening with. I watched him clean it on the goblins leather armor and stuff it into a pouch we kept to store loot attached to our packs.
“I found a few pouches of coins, too, but we just earned over ten silver each from one fight. Crazy,” I said with a shake of my head. I was having trouble wrapping my head around earning so much money so quickly. After we finished looting I went over to talk with Gary since the sun was getting close to setting.
“Hey, are we going to camp here or do you want to retreat back a bit into the forest? I asked.
“I think it’s best to stay here in the clearing for the night. At least we can see anyone coming if we stay here,” Gary responded. I nodded and we gathered up before heading towards the village to check the state of the buildings. We searched the crude wooden structures and decided to sleep in the large hut in the center of the village. I volunteered for the first watch after we ate dinner. I spent the night outside thinking over my role in the fight and studying the changes in my Status.
Eli - Lvl 4 Druid
Experience - 1580/5000
Strength-8
Dexterity-7
Perception-6
Vitality-7
Spirit-9 (+1)
Willpower-9
Barkskin - Level 6\10 Upgradeable
Experience - 1640\3200
Thornbolt - Level 4\20 Upgradeable
Experience - 1030\1600
Rejuvenation - Level 3\10 Upgradeable
Experience - 720\800
Entangle - Level 1\5 Upgradeable
Experience - 70\100
I finally reached level nine spirit, and when I focused I could feel that the size of my core of Essence was larger than before. I cast a few skills to deplete my essence entirely and I seemed to have gained slightly less than a tenth more essence from the level. I would be able to cast rejuvenation twice in a row with a full core if necessary now. I closed my Status and realized I was standing watch in the middle of the bloodfields with no essence, now. I couldn’t afford to get so lost in studying my status that I endangered my entire team. I had been thinking recently of how lucky I was to be on this team. We worked well together while fighting and everyone seemed to get along very well personally. My watch passed quietly and I woke Gabriella up a couple hours later to take over.
“Eli! Get over here, quick!” Ben shouted at me from the front of my parents' yard. I glanced over interestedly, glad to have any excuse for a break from washing rags.
“What? I gotta finish cleaning Mom's rags before I go help her in the shop.” I responded as I looked over at him.
Ben waved frantically while I was talking and his green eyes almost glowed in the sun as it crested over the roofs of the nearby shops. “It doesn’t matter, we have to go. I heard from James there's a party of adventurers that just came in through Durhils gate with a Gryphon!” Ben was nearly shouting by the end and I felt myself start to smile as his excitement rubbed off on me. I glanced back to the shop hesitantly for a moment but I didn’t hear any noise coming from inside. I turned back to Ben, grinned, and dropped the rag I was cleaning on the small stack of clean rags I had managed to work through in the past few minutes.
“Where are they taking it?” I asked as I jogged over to him quietly, “How did James find out? How are we gonna find them?” Ben took off running down the market street and responded once I caught up to him.
“James was bringing his Dad's breakfast to Durhils gate when the adventurers got there,” Ben spoke quickly as we took a turn onto the grocers street. “The adventurers said it was a guild mission posted by one of those high-level beast tamer shops in nobles district.” I skidded to a stop after I heard that.
“Are you crazy?” I looked at Ben in surprise once he stopped and turned towards me. “The guards will beat us if they see us walking around in there!” I shouted at him in the empty street.
“No way! Adventurers are bringing in a Gryphon,” Ben threw his hands up and looked at me seriously. “I bet there are a hundred people there to see it!” I frowned as I thought about it and glanced up at Ben. “Eli, this is our chance.” Ben walked over and grabbed my shoulder. “We can’t join the Guild for another six years, who knows how long it will be until we see a Gryphon again!’ I debated for a moment before I grinned and nodded; with enough people on the street watching there’s no way the guards would notice us. I focused on running through the mostly empty streets of the market district. With the sun just coming up the streets were just starting to fill with early-morning shoppers and workers. A few minutes later we reached the end of the market district and saw the tell-tale sign of the nobles district in the distance. A large wall separated the rest of the city from the nobles district, although the gate was only technically closed during the hordes.
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From the comparatively mundane mix of the plain brick buildings that made up the market district we cautiously entered a street made up of fancy magic-wrought buildings with glass displays lining the store-fronts. Ben and I slowed to a walk just before we reached the first of the buildings and entered the unusually busy crowd of people heading towards a crowd of people gathered around a large compound in the distance. I edged towards the side of the street so I could see into the display cases as we walked.
“Ben, do you see those?” I asked as I pointed into the building we were passing. The two-story building was made of some type of faintly glowing dark brown wood lined with runes. The glass display windows along the front had pale white mage lights placed over the tops of an assortment of finely crafted metal bracers, belts, and wristguards. All of the gear had runes clearly engraved into them and a small sign placed just below.
“A belt of strength.” Ben looked at me, eyes wide as he stopped beside it. I read the small sign as I stopped next to him.
Belt of Strength
Imbues the wearer with a moderate (4) increase to their strength statistic
12 Gold Coins
“12 Gold,” I said despondently, “no way we’ll be able to afford something like that before we join the guild.” Ben nodded glumly towards me and we continued walking with the crowd. Our shared misery didn’t last long as we made the most of the rare opportunity to walk the streets of the nobles district. We passed dozens of fancy shops filled with magical items and expertly crafted weapons and armor. An alchemist's shop had rows of small vials easily identified as health, mana, and stamina potions. A mage’s store had three displays featuring scrolls of various earth magic spells. A few minutes later the crowded street got so packed that only our small figures allowed us to squeeze through towards the front of the waiting pedestrians huddled around the entrance to a massive establishment. A large sign was placed on top of the front gate that introduced the store as Devin’s Beast Mastery.
“Look!” Ben shouted over the noise of the people standing near us. “I think that’s the team bringing the Gryphon!” I looked over at Ben’s words and saw a group of four adventurers. Two of the adventurers were sitting on the front of a wagon with a large cage sitting on the back. Another two adventurers walked beside the wagon, easily recognizable by the chainmail worn by one and the black robe worn by the other. The four adventurers made steady progress towards us as they nodded politely towards the excited people they passed along the road. They stopped for a moment to greet another group of what looked like adventurers and then continued until they reached the entrance to the Beast Master’s shop.
I stood on my toes and could just barely see inside of the cage. A brown bird's beak with the body of what looked like a cat slept peacefully in the center of the cage. It was only about the size of a large dog and I found myself both intrigued and disappointed.
“It must be a baby, I heard adult Grphons are larger than a warhorse.” My eyes grew wide as I looked over to a rich-looking man standing a few feet away from me and Ben.
“Did you hear him, Ben? I knew it was too small!” I said to Ben as I tried to imagine what a grown-up version of the Gryphon would look like. Ben didn’t respond as his gaze shifted excitedly between the sleeping Gryphon and the adventurers passing through the gate in front of us. An official-looking attendant met them halfway down the paved path and after a short conversation he took the wagon through a gate a few hundred paces away from the front building. The crowd started to disperse after the wagon disappeared behind the gate but I watched the party of adventurers with interest until they entered the main building with another attendant. I let out a sigh, turned to Ben, and watched him turn to face me with determination shining in his eyes.
“That’s gonna be us, Eli. I swear it,” he said seriously as he looked me in the eyes to gauge my resolve.
“Those Silvers?” I scoffed, “As Gold ranks, we’ll be bringing in dragons!”
Aaron shook me awake a few hours later and I joined the rest of my team for breakfast after I packed up my bedroll. My thoughts turned back to my dream as I methodically packed away my gear. I hadn’t dreamed of Ben in years, and I still felt some pain from thinking about him. He died two years after that during the years monster horde. It had been a bad horde and the city was breached in multiple places for a few hours before the adventurers guild finished pushing them back and began clearing them out of the city. I had nightmares for years and I mostly stopped playing with the other boys who lived on the market street afterwards.
“Morning, Eli,” Gary greeted me after I sat down to eat my bowl of oats and dried fruit beside him.
“Hey, what’s the plan today?” I asked loudly enough for the whole team to hear me.
“We’re going to head south and look for more Awakened hobgoblins for the rest of this expedition. I don’t think we’ll manage to reach level five from this trip, but if we push ourselves we’ll be able to earn a lot of silver from the monster cores.” Gary said after the rest of the team gathered around us.
“If we find a few more monster cores before we head back to Gorok I’d like to spend longer at the city to train and take a trip back to Brightswell through the portal.” I responded.
“Yeah, that’s fine with me,” Gary agreed. Everyone else agreed and we would wait to decide how long to spend in the city after we knew how much we earned from the trip. We still had about five days worth of rations to spend searching the forest before we would have to head back.
The next few days passed similarly to the fight we had at the small village. We found three more awakened hobgoblins that we managed to kill in a similar way each time. All of the villages were around the same size so we just had Aaron pull the group to us so we weren’t overrun at the start of the fight. The Awakened hobgoblins all had different weapons and skills and every time we fought them it struck me how much more intelligent they were than the regular dungeon monsters we fought. We discussed it a few times and Aaron thought they recieved a class the same way we did.
We ran into another group of adventurers fighting in one of the villages on our last day before we planned on heading back to the city.
“I don’t think they need help,” Gabriella said as we all watched the adventurers clear the village from the treeline. Four of them used ranged attacks and spells to clear everything that moved towards them while the last heavily armored adventurer fought a pair of hobgoblins alone. The skills I saw flying through the air were clearly more powerful than ours and I realized this had to be a group of E-rank adventurers.
“This seems too easy for them,” Aaron said as we watched the fight continue in the distance. “I wonder why they’re not hunting something more difficult.” I watched the armored adventurer kill the last hobgoblin and start looting while the rest of his team finished any other goblins that headed towards them as they casually walked towards the dead hobgoblins.
“Maybe they’re passing it as they go deeper,” Gabriella suggested with a shrug.
“Well, I guess let’s just head back. If we leave now we can still get out of the bloodfields today,” Gary said. We made quick time during the hike back since I was sure everyone was ready to finally get out of the odd, dangerous woods. With a total of four monster cores and some other loot from the past few days of hunting the bloodfields, I would have plenty of money to use the portal to Brightswell. I was looking forward to seeing my parents again and telling them how the past few weeks had gone.