"Sophie, do you think you could begin dinner? I'm about to make my rounds through the temporary housing."
"I can handle it. Could you bring me the cutlery from outside? It should be drying on the bench next to the wagon."
Cressida and Sophia were both going about their routine, finding themselves carrying on in a lax manner compared to their old routine. Over the course of the last month, their daughter had been primarily training with their family friend, Hatsumi, and her daughter Kiyomi.
"Let's see, 'bench next to the wagon."
Cressida muttered to herself, slithering out of the entrance of the dining tent she and her wife had been resting in. Moving along the wagon placed along the side, the bench came into view from around the corner.
"Hmmm, ah- there you are."
Looking over the table, placed at the far corner, was a set of five knives specially made for cooking, laid out across a leather pouch. Placing each knife carefully into its own respective slot in the pouch, Cressida rolled up the parcel and took it in hand. Re-entering the tent shortly after, she was treated to a subtly swaying Sophia, humming in tune to some unrecognizable song as she washed kitchenware in a basin. Realizing that Sophia hadn't noticed her return, Cressida thought to share a moment with her wife before setting out for her work. Slowly creeping up on the unsuspecting Sophia, the slightly larger of the two Lamia eyed her prey. Taking in the sight one last time, Cressida pounced.
"Ah! Creeeesss, I'm cleaniiinnng. Didn't you want dinner by your return?"
Cressida had claimed her prize, embracing Sophia from behind and burying her face into her wife's neck as her arms wrapped around to squeeze their captive.
"Mu- 'm sampling desert for a moment."
Cressida pecked at Sophia's ear before taking in her scent, the smell of mountain flowers and a few herbs they'd gathered giving her a pleasant aroma. Swaying to the same tune Sophia hummed just a moment before; Cressida leaned onto her wife stood there hugging her.
"Cressida?"
"Still sampling~."
"Hehe, Cress, come oooon. You can 'sample' later love, for now, let me get dinner ready."
Sophia responded, pressing herself from Cressida and breaking the grip over her. Turning around to see a now pouting wife, she leaned in and returned the kiss from earlier to Cressida's forehead.
"Besides, If the coast is clear, we can do much more than 'sample'; we can enjoy a full course together."
Sophia teased, tracing a finger along a particular crease in Cressida's waist wrap.
"Ah, hello! Okay, haha! I'll look forward to it. In the meantime, here."
Reaching back to the table behind them, Cressida handed Sophia the parcel containing the knives.
"Thank you, want me to see you out the tent with a cup of coffee and a kiss?"
A slight eerie grumbling noise caught Cressida's attention as Sophia asked her, but she wrote it off as if it were from the construction.
"That would be nice, would you?"
"The pot's already boiling.~"
Sophia chimed, looking to an open-topped crate for some form of cup. Amidst the noise of clutter, this time, both of them found pause as the grumbling noise returned, this time with a slightly louder groan. As it subsided, Sophia resumed her search, producing a ceramic mug.
"The construction is rather loud lately. Wasn't the quarry closed the last few days?"
Sophia asked, now pouring the hot liquid into the mug.
"Yeah... yeah, it has been-"
The grumbling returned, albeit subtle compared to the first two instances. For a moment, the two Lamia looked to each other, puzzled as they thought of what it could be before an extremely distinct and painfully familiar noise rang out. It was the sound of lightning that pierced the area, lightning that continued its charge for nearly a dozen seconds before ceasing, lightning that occurred on a perfectly clear day with not a cloud in sight.
"It couldn't be..."
Cressida was puzzled for a moment, denying to herself what she initially worried was the cause.
"She wouldn't use it without good reason, the whole reason we taught her that level of magic was for emergencies... but that sounded close."
Sophia approached Cressida with the now steaming mug after placing the coffee pot to the side.
"You're right; I don't know what I'm thinking... I should check it out on my rounds, though."
"You do that, my beautiful protector.~"
Sophia teased, handing the coffee mug to her wife. With the two headed out of the tent, they were greeted by a slew of onlookers standing in the road, to the side of the road, or outside their tents—each of them staring at a small dissipating cloud formation over the woods not far from their home.
"I wonder what it could have been."
Sophia asked.
"I don't know yet; I'll find out, though. That's really close."
Cressida attempted to finish her comment as the two were suddenly mesmerized by a sudden rush of dust and rock being thrown into the air just a few kilometers away. Shortly after, the ground tremored weakly and was followed by a sudden unexpected sound.
THOOM!
Just as the echo of the explosion subsided, another noise rang out. This time within clear view, as Cressida and Sophia were both staring straight in its path. The sudden formation of clouds condensing and the bright flash of electricity shooting down to the ground. It lasted for nearly forty seconds this time, and the sound it emitted was that of a strange repeating crack. Suddenly, the crackling died off with the cessation of the flow of lightning from the small dense clouds.
Before, Sophia and Cressida didn't recognize it directly because they didn't witness it. But with the magic being cast in front of their eyes, the two began to panic. This was signaled by the sudden drop of the coffee mug as Sophia's face turned pale.
"Beryl..."
Sophia muttered under her breath.
"Ber- shit! Beryl!"
The sounds of yelling and commands being issued to whatever guard was caught in the way echoed through the campsite as the two Lamia found themselves rushing towards the source of the clouds. To the magic they recognized as their daughter's.
----------------------------------------
The wind was blowing just hard enough across the side of the mountain that the party of four all had dawned light coats while they had stopped for the day to rest. Hatsumi, Chessa, Stannis, and Callum were each sitting around a small pit of burning coals that warmed a Dutch oven filled with their meal.
“Think the merchants will get through Morus without being caught?"
Chessa broke the silence.
"If they don't, there's no way to have an accurate understanding of what's happening in Va-ren. Until that happens, we, and the rest of the empire are in the dark."
Stannis crossed his arms as he responded, scratching his neck just below his beard.
"In the meantime, we need to get our story straight. We all know the mo. We killed an extremely territorial Skullker, it was an Apex class, and it kept us occupied a few days longer than expected. Right, Hatsumi?"
Callum asked, looking to Hatsumi, the party leader who was staring intently into the coals surrounding the oven. There was a slight pause, where Callum thought that Hatsumi might have not been paying attention. Not long after, Hatsumi acknowledged him and gave an answer.
"Absolutely no mention of this event goes to anyone except Lorn and Victor. Doing so would jeopardize the very security of the territory for now. If word got out that the Lords' bordering Morus were probing for an idea of the situation, Morus would simply lash out before we could ever hope to offer resistance."
Hatsumi spoke, her eyes appearing devoid of life as she continued to stare.
"The situation along our border was already worse than expected... purposefully diverting highly territorial and predatory monsters towards its borders to throw off any bordering country... all of the purges... I still can't believe the word from the empire is they were the result of 'rogue monsters.' Tch."
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
Hatsumi clicked her tongue, her face shifting in expression from exhaustion to extreme irritation.
"Be happy with the reprisal we've gotten with this assignment, for now; you can't go back to Kiyomi being indefinitely angry. She'll know something else happened."
Chessa stabbed at the coals with a knife, stirring the burning material underneath to keep the heat from dissipating too soon.
"She does seem that perceptive, doesn't she? Hhhhh, I understand... it's just... the wound feels torn open..."
Hatsumi's mood had deteriorated throughout the entire ordeal, but only now that it was done did she choose to speak her mind.
"How many paladins and acolytes did we kill?"
Callum asked aloud, prompting a response from his brother sooner than expected.
"They weren't Paladins... They were bloody death worshipers... its a mystery they still address themselves as such."
Stannis was irritated in his own sorts, finding his own former title being sullied by what Orion's church had made of it.
"After checking each of the bodies for what I could, the total came out to four Paladins and thirteen acolytes. We're lucky Hatsumi caught most of them in a single shot. If the field wasn't leveled out, one of us would be coming back as ashes at the least."
Chessa answered Callum's question in earnest, now brushing the coals from the dutch oven and opening its lid with a small hook. With their cooking meal no longer suffocated by its iron housing, the aroma surrounded the group in the smell of delicious spices, vegetables, and meat. A stew that they were saving for the completion of the mission before heading back.
"Ahhh, smells like home."
Callum mused, his eyes closed as he imagined years prior where they'd been given food by their parents.
"Hey, what do you figure Lorn's been feeding Kiyomi?"
Callum suddenly perked up with his question, looking to Hatsumi.
"Callum, your attempts to change the subject are appreciated, but they're... poor."
Hatsumi sighed as she showed her disapproval.
"If anything, you bringing her up makes me want to continue walking. I need to get a dose of my daughter... yeah, going back to doting on her will help a bit."
Hatsumi groaned soon after her thoughts were successfully derailed.
"Thank you, Callum."
"Here every day."
The two shared small comments back and forth.
"Hey, maybe you should take a vacation when we get back... I mean, the rest of us don't need it. But Hatsumi, you're not the only person to consider. Knowing Kiyomi, she's probably worried sick considering how late we are."
Stannis grabbed a wooden cup from his satchel as he said this, attempting to dip it directly into the stew before having his hand slapped by Chessa.
"Sorry... just couldn't wait."
Stannis rubbed his wrist after the quick swat, evidently too tired to continue.
"Aargh, FUCK! Now I'm WORRIED about her worrying, thanks, Stannis!"
Hatsumi groaned for the umpteenth time since they'd stopped to rest.
"You're welcome, here every-"
A low grumbling noise occurred, forcing the group to take pause.
"That sounded like lightning-based magic... I thought Cressida and I were the only ones in the area that could use it...”
Hatsumi stood up, looking across the scenery for any signs of low cloud formations.
"You should have been; we didn't find anyone else with an aptitude for it aside from you two last we looked."
Stannis mumbled past a mouth full of stewed beef that he was attempting to scarf down as a now very irritated elf was hitting him with a stick.
"What could have-"
A sudden rush of rock and dust flying into the air surprised Hatsumi. They had been easily a couple of dozen kilometers from the city, yet their position on the side of the mountain provided a prime audience for a spectacle that should never have occurred that close to Brenton. This sudden rush was followed by a small vibration in the ground before a very faint and muffled noise reached everyone's ears.
Crack.
While it was distant, the fact that they could still hear it spoke of the size of the explosion.
"What the hell is going on down there?!"
Hatsumi was struggling to wrap her head around what she saw before directly witnessing the same lightning magic she'd heard earlier.
So it is Lightning magic? What the hell is going on?!
Those words stuck themselves to the forefront of Hatsumi's mind as everyone in the party joined her, staring at the small spectacle and the now dissipating cloud.
----------------------------------------
"Beryl! Beryl! Can you hear Mama?! We're on our way!"
The sound of snapping twigs and rushed movement through the forest could be heard as Sophia slithered as fast as she could manage.
"Beryyyl? If you can hear us, please respond!"
Cressida called out, barely keeping pace as she did her best to leave a trail for the guards following them.
"Cressida, we're getting close!"
Sophia yelled to her partner as they continued advancing. As they moved through the woods, the scent of something odd caught their attention.
"Sophia, do you smell that?"
"Burned flesh, yeah!"
Cressida and Sophia followed the scent to its source. Having covered most of the distance already, it was barely another two or three minutes until something odd came into sight.
Is that a building?
Sophia squinted as she asked herself this.
"Hey, somethings over here!"
Approaching the out-of-place steeple, a much more apparent clearing came into view. She could not see much of it initially, but as she got closer, its size became more and more apparent, just as the building did. She called out to Cressida and what guards that managed to catch up to them.
"Beryl? Are you here? Beryl?"
Sophia yelled out as she approached, Cressida now joining her. As the two continued whilst awaiting a response, a weak call to them was heard. Their daughter calling back to them in response to their yelling.
"Moth-Mama Sophie! Mama Cress!"
Her voice was strained and weak, terminating from beyond a section of brush that obstructed their view into the clearing. The same thought ran through each Lamia's head.
What could make our daughter so weak as to call them by their in-house names?
"Beryl! We're on our way!"
Sophia yelled out, suddenly rushing forward to the brush. Cressida attempted to stop her or slow her down, but Sophia was absorbed in checking on her daughter too much to hear her partner just at that moment.
"Sophia-wait, careful!"
"Beryl, I'm almost- Ahhh!"
Sophia shot through the brush, greeted by a sudden decline that left her scrambling to maintain her balance as her body broke traction and she slid down into the clearing.
"Sophia! Be caref-... ful... By the Gods."
Cressida ceased her speech; her eyes caught on the source of the smell. The burnt flesh of a monster was inevitably the culprit; she assumed this. Yet the true source, the smoldering corpse of an absolutely massive Bulette, was a virtually unbelievable sight for her. She'd never seen one of this size, let alone expected to see it so far from the plains region to the west. Of course, who else was located in its proverbial shadow other than their daughter, Beryl. Coiled around her two friends, one of which was unconscious and the other bordering on it just as she herself appeared.
"Beryl!"
"Mama!"
----------------------------------------
Shortly after the fight ended, Beryl's parents and a group of guards found us in the clearing. It was maybe ten minutes after Beryl's second strike killed the Bulette. Now we were sitting in a tent alongside Beryl's family tent. On one makeshift bed, Beryl was laying down, now asleep from the exhaustion. She looked comparatively more sick than she should have been, at least by my experience so far with mana exhaustion. On another laid Vaughn, who was still unconscious. He seemed to be coming around as he mumbled things in his sleep and wasn't appearing distressed. I, however, was very stressed, sitting in front of two very distressed Mothers who were actively pressing me for some sort of explanation.
"Kiyomi, we can tell you're hiding something. Hesitancy is not easily hidden with you."
Cressida spoke to me as she and her wife, Sophia, sat on their coils across from me. Thankfully, they weren't angry but rather worried.
"There is nothing you need to hide from us, Kiyomi, regardless of how the monster's end came about. We need to piece together what information we can. That monster appearing so close to town is our largest concern."
You wouldn't exactly believe something like that, would you?
Sophia's tone took a much more pleasing tone than her counterpart.
"Let's start from square one, okay?"
Sophia leaned forward, propping her elbows on a portion of her coils that she'd propped up.
"What were you doing before the Bulette appeared?"
Leading with her first question, Sophia's patience appeared to endure slightly longer than Cressida's.
Hah, fuck me... what can I really tell them?! That we were supposedly alerted BY the system and thrown into some shitty chickenfight by some Gods? I can tell them, and they probably wouldn't believe me... why do I feel like I want Lorn to be here, though? And I feel like there's something I'm forgetting.
Taking a moment to breathe in, I did my best to keep in line with their questioning.
"We were training in the clearing, in front of the Temple? I got sick from forgetting to eat this morning."
Strangely enough, that felt worse to say than it should have. Embarrassment?
"Beryl had us go back into the Temple to eat some lunch, and I'd gone to get some air."
Cressida and Sophia continued to listen intently.
"We all suddenly got an alert from the system? Something about Orion and Solah. The system said 'the Goddess, Solah, has formed you party' or something like that. It said to escape or kill the monster - Beryl and Vaughn started arguing after Vaughn said he'd distract it while we ran... Beryl and I wouldn't have it. Beryl said we couldn't outrun it. So we made a plan... a bad one... but what else could we do?"
I paused for a moment, trying to find a way to explain further, but Cressida spoke her mind.
"Kiyomi, do you take us for fools? Are you trying to spin some kind of yarn? Solah? Orion?"
Cressida appeared irritated; aside from her expression, her tail actively sweeping the floor was a further cue.
"I'm not lying! Beryl and Vaughn will say the same!"
I tried biting back, holding my ground on what I said.
"Bullshit, Kiyomi, this is serious. Usually, we would be more careful about language and such with this, but such a claim is extremely dangerous. You need to understand the weight you're throwing around with your tall tale."
Cressida continued asserting her thought that the explanation wasn't truthful.
I knew they wouldn't believe a word!
"It's not, okay?! I thought about giving you a lie, but what exactly am I supposed to do? You think it's hard to believe for you? Imagine actually getting the message! Beryl was terrified, and Vaughn said some stuff that made me think he was prepared to do something idiotic!"
I reflexively stood from my own bed as I retaliated.
I can't take the bullshit of following people along anymore. I need to put my foot down on this. Would telling them something else even have a better end result?
Initially, I expected some kind of negative reaction. It was almost surreal, given it was probably the first time in a while I've directly spoken my mind towards an adult other than Lorn or Mother. Unexpectedly, Cressida didn't press on me for a 'better' explanation. Instead, she appeared hesitant, looking to Sophia for some kind of backup from what I could presume. Looking at Sophia, I was surprised to see that she was almost staring into my soul with her eyes giving off a strange red glow that contrasted with their normal appearance.
What the fuck?
Seeing the change in form as Sophia nearly stared through me was unnerving; I actually felt myself shift in stance slightly. I was about to take my seat once more before Sophia sighed heavily, and her expression became deathly serious.
"She's not lying..."
"Are you sure?"
Cressida asked, visibly hoping for a different answer. Meanwhile, Sophia, who continued sporting the expression, shook her head in affirmation.
"We'll continue this discussion with Lorn present. We may as well not delve further for now. Kiyomi, I'm sorry we lost patience with you."
Sophia 'stood' from her coils before gently wrapping her arms around me.
"Rest up; we'll need you to be there with us. Okay?"
Sophia asked as she pulled away, waiting for a response.
"Yes, ma'am."
Sophia nodded at my response before leaving the tent, Cressida following immediately after giving her own apology.
"Let us know if you need anything, okay?"
Cressida leaned through the door as the rest of her body snaked through.
"Thank you."
I gave the shortest response I felt appropriate in response, prompting a nod from her as she fully left the tent.
Of all things, still, I'm forgetting something... why?