After my experience with Team Legion, I made sure to spend some time each day looking for other teams who might need backup, but wasn’t lucky enough to find any, so I went back to wandering alone.
I made a point of exploring the hexes surrounding the city. I’d already seen the Black Altar to the Northwest, so working clockwise to the Northeast there was nothing but a solitary snow-capped mountain thrusting up from the highlands. I was prepared to flee at any moment, at any sign of more giant ants, since this was the direction from which the horde had come, but apart from a few unfortunate goblins I met no resistance in this area. I already knew the forest to the East, but below that, to the Southeast, the Forbidden Lake promised adventure. However, it proved to be an adventure that would have to wait until some time in the future.
The lake itself was huge, covering about the same area as the city, but was unlike any lake I’d ever seen on Earth. As far as I could tell, it was physically impossible. It was roughly round, bordered by the trees of the Eastern Forest on one side and beautiful beaches of tiny, smooth pebbles on the other. Pretty normal so far. Clear, cool water lapped at the beach I stood on as I looked out at it. Still normal, but a few hundred feet from the lake’s edge, things got impossible. At this point, all the way around the lake, the water dropped away, like a big circular waterfall leaving a large, empty cavity in the middle. A perfectly round cylinder of rock rose from the center of this cavity like a tower, hundreds of feet in diameter, its top disappearing into the clouds. A chasm of emptiness separated this from the water’s edge. Adventure surely awaited way up there, but until I had the ability to get there, it would have to keep waiting.
The village of Caldeon sat in the center of the Southwest hex. It was a farming town, surrounded by the fields that fed the city’s many mouths. It almost felt like any other farming community, full of NPC’s busily working away on their ordinary lives, except that there was an overwhelming sense of gloom hanging over the town and everyone in it. While looking around the main street, I noticed all the locals suddenly stop whatever they were doing to watch a carriage coming up the road. I couldn’t see who was inside it, the windows weren’t just covered by curtains, they’d been painted completely black.
“Who’s in the carriage?” I asked a shopkeeper.
“Another poor unfortunate soul, stricken by the madness.”
“The madness?”
The shopkeeper sighed before delivering their exposition. “It started a few months ago. A farmboy suddenly went crazy, attacking his family.”
“Because of the madness?”
The shopkeeper nodded.
“What causes it?”
They shrugged. “I wish we knew. Dozens have been inflicted since.”
“Where’s the carriage taking them?”
They pointed up the street to what looked like a small church. All its windows had been painted black.
“What’s with the black paint?”
“To block the light from making the madness worse.”
Once the carriage had passed, people went back to their tasks. I thanked the shopkeeper and bought a small basket of what I thought were olives, but turned out to be soft, juicy berries that tasted like licorice. I considered sticking around in Caldeon for a while — there was most certainly an adventure here uncovering the cause of the madness epidemic and finding a way to stop it — but I didn’t quite feel ready to take on something like this by myself, so I put a pin in it and promised myself to come back later. Besides, I had one more hex adjacent to the city to explore, the one to the immediate West.
The final hex bordered the city’s Western gate, the one managed by the kung fu warriors of the Dragon Clan. When I’d gone through this gate with Jane and Sigrid on my second night here, the night we explored the Black Altar, we’d turned North immediately. Had we kept going West along the well-traveled road, we would have reached the bridge over the Serpent River. In the middle of this hex there was something the locals called the Giant’s Mound I wanted to see.
I was curious why the road didn’t go straight West toward the coast, but instead followed right next to the river as it meandered along the bottom of the hex toward the town of Seaside on the edge of the Great Western Sea. The question was answered when I saw a convoy of three barges heading toward the city, pulled along the river by a massive beast that resembled a brontosaurus. This monster, easily the size of a large truck, stirred up clouds of dust as it plodded along the road, hauling the barges by thick ropes connecting them all together. A single carriage followed the beast, along with five people riding smaller creatures that were like some kind of dinosaur and reminded me of the tauntauns Luke and Han rode in The Empire Strikes Back, three in front of the big dino, and two behind the carriage. The riders looked like a party of adventurers, decked out in armor and armed to the teeth, but they weren’t Players.
And they weren’t sharing the road.
The road was certainly wide enough. There was plenty of room for them to move to one side, and me to the other, so we could pass each other amicably. I went to the right side but they kept going straight, taking up the entire width of the road.
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“Outa the way,” one of them barked, a large man in heavy armor with a gigantic sword slung on his back.
Before I even knew it, I’d stepped off the road into the long weeds on the side.
What the hell?
Flint Vivier
Silver Sword Leader
Powers:
I Can Still Hit You Way Over There - Expert: Ranged sword attack
I Swing, You Fall - Master: An extra-powerful sword attack
Respect My Authoritay - Expert: A commanding aura that demands obedience
That All You Got? - Expert: Ignore an attack
Skills:
Knife - Expert
Leadership - Expert
Sword - Master
Tracking - Expert
Oh, I see. So this is the Silver Sword mercenary group Shashu mentioned. Damn, he’s strong. He’d probably give that pink-haired S-ranker Akari a run for her money.
I used All Shall Be Revealed on the others, and they were all equally powerful. In addition to the swordsman leader, there was an obvious tank with a gigantic rectangular shield, an archer, one with support and buff powers, and one with heavy damage-dealing elemental powers: a well-rounded party.
Even if he hadn’t used his power that demanded obedience on me, I would’ve had to step aside. There’s no way I could take on one of them by myself, let alone the whole group. Hell, even all of Team Maple Leaf plus the Round Table and I together wouldn’t stand a chance.
But that didn’t mean I was happy about it.
I glared at them as they passed, but they hardly gave me a second glance. Just when I was starting to gain a little confidence in my abilities, I was forcibly reminded of my insignificance by these overpowered and overbearing NPCs.
They kept going toward the city and I went in the opposite direction, Westward toward the sea. I didn’t go far, though, just far enough to get a good look at the hill they called the Giant’s Mound. It was obvious why they called it that, because it resembled an enormous body half-buried in the ground. No doubt there was an adventure to be found there too, but the day was getting on and I was still in a bad mood because of my brief encounter with the Silver Sword, so I turned around and went home.
In only the six hexes immediately surrounding the city I’d identified a number of potential adventures, but I was alone, and I didn’t feel ready to face anything big on my own, so after this initial exploration I ended up spending most of my time inside the city walls where there was ample opportunity to improve my abilities and learn new skills. In particular, I wanted to work on omni-do and its component skills, so I made a point of going to all of the other martial arts clans to seek training from their masters.
I decided to start with a martial art I already knew, jiu jitsu, so that meant going to the Eagle Clan on Axe Street. Even though they had good relations with the Dragon Clan, the Eagle Clan Master saw my green armband and was wary of me at first. But once I demonstrated that I knew some jiu jitsu I was permitted to train and even earned their blue armband along with membership in the Eagle Clan. I was only hoping to improve my skill, I hadn’t expected the added boon of joining the clan too. I didn’t even know it was possible to join more than one. It felt weird having an armband on each arm, so I twisted the two together and wore them on the same arm.
From there, I spent the following days working my way around the city and ended up earning the red armband of the Wolf Clan, the yellow one of the Rat Clan, the purple one of the Monkey Clan, and the orange one of the Tiger Clan as well. I was now a member of all six clans and welcome anywhere in the city, and had raised my fighting ability significantly. On my left bicep, I wore an armband that consisted of all six colors woven together. Omni-do now also included all six of the city's core martial arts, as well as a few other fighting styles I picked up along the way, and I had reached Adept level in it after testing it against minor foes such as goblins and wolves. My proficiency with Affinity Control had also capped out at Adept, as had my mastery of most of the individual affinities.
Over the weeks I spent doing all this, the teams and other Players continued to be given regular quests, and I continued to be snubbed. Feeling stronger after my training and leveling up, I went back outside the city walls. It was time to take on some of those adventures.
I decided to start by going back into the forest. Ever since my last visit I couldn’t get that wall of thorns out of my head. There was something I wanted to try. On a whim, I decided to drop by the orc camp first. I had learned firsthand that we Players could respawn, but what about monsters? I snuck through the trees and sure enough, when I got close enough I could hear the guttural grunts that passed as orc communication up ahead. I was feeling pretty confident, and even though I knew it was reckless and probably incredibly stupid, I decided to take on the orcs by myself.
If things went south, after all those morning workouts with Sigrid I was pretty sure I could always just run away. My cardio was much improved.
Being as stealthy as I could, I snuck up to the edge of the orcs’ clearing. I could see a pair of them slumped on crude wooden benches beside a fire, upon which a large cauldron of something burbled and boiled. I had no idea what they were cooking in that pot, but whatever it was, it smelled truly foul.
With Adept level in both Affinity Control and my affinity with Fire, I was now able to conjure a decent fireball out of thin air. Even better, I could take an existing fire and make it explosive. I watched and waited to see if I could locate the other orcs, but quickly got bored and anxious and realized I was just dawdling because I was afraid. One of the orcs stood up and dipped a wooden ladle into the pot, scooping out a spoonful and raising it to its tusky mouth. As the orc sipped, I saw the arm of a tiny creature reach out from the big spoon and grab at the orc’s face. The orc grunted, then took a big slurp, gobbling down the entire contents of the ladle. I heard something crunch in its mouth. That was about enough for me, I’d had my fill of orc-watching, so I took a deep breath and focused on the bonfire under the cauldron.
It exploded in a most rewarding way.