Morning came with a crisp, cold dew, the air chilly compared to the day before. Eyes heavy with sleep, Alden sat upright and stretched his aching muscles, desiring nothing more than to lie back down and rest another minute or two. But a minute or two would become five, then ten, then fifteen. Not time he could waste, after the events of yesterday.

Yet Alden found some time to waste. Walking far outside the camp, he searched for the spot he’d found the night before. Finding it again was easier than he’d have liked.

The block of cheese he’d left out the night before sat uneaten and untouched, save for a group of bugs and snails.

The peryton had stopped following them, then. That did not bode well for his quest, he thought. Worse, he had begun to grow attached to the beast.

Packing up camp in quick order, they set out north and west, their three carriages creaking as they passed over every little rock and bump along the way. Even in the saddle of his own horse, Alden could feel the roughness of the ground jolting through him.

The cost of not riding upon the roads, which were flat and even and well-worn, perfectly suited for long travel. Alas, they could not. The deserters had gone off-road, and so they followed.

Alden sighed. The chasing had begun to wear on his nerves, and the exhaustion he felt only worsened matters. An aftereffect of Tribulation. Looking at his Stats, he was stronger than ever, faster than ever, yet he felt completely drained, as if there was nothing left to fuel him.

Sighing again, Alden spurred his horse forward and sidled up beside Amice. Only the two of them had a horse to themselves; the rest, much to their pleasure, rode upon the carriages, alternating drivers now and again.

They exchanged glances, and Alden was pleased to see that Amice welcomed his presence. She always did. Though, to his discomfort, she never sought him out.

“About yesterday,” he began, contemplating where to start. “During the Tribulation… I felt something. A different kind of energy.”

“Different? How so?”

“The kind I was feeling before was solid, like rock. That’s what I was pulling during meditation. But during the Tribulation, I felt an energy that flowed easily. Like water.”

Amice shrugged. “Soul energy, I would presume.”

“Is it dangerous?” he asked. The energy had been new, easily used. A boon, on the surface, yet fear niggled at his thoughts. Who was to say that this new energy would not kill him?

Amice shook her head. “Have no fear, there is no danger to using soul energy, if what Mother said was correct. It is merely a different way to cultivate. And a useful one, at that. The Soul Arts are used to enhance materials, as my armor was.”

Interesting. He would have to try that later.

“You aren’t able to use it, are you?” he asked.

“I am not,” she said, pausing. “I have tried, many times, but even with Mother’s aid it was a hopeless endeavor. You, I imagine, will excel at it even more than you have with the Body Arts.”

“Perhaps,” he replied. He agreed with her assertion, in truth. If his usage the previous day was any indication, he had a knack for Soul Arts. Extreme Skill Development was a monumental aide, of course. Without it he wouldn’t have even reached the First Step as quickly as he did.

It was irritating, in a way. How he could only excel with special powers like this. Hard work had never been his forte, but that did not mean that he did not respect it. He had grown, certainly, and faced struggles of his own, life and death situations. But could he call that hard work?

He didn’t think so.

It mattered little now, he supposed. Feeling his thighs chafe against the saddle, the thump of the horses hooves plodding against the dirt, and the clean wind brushing against his skin, he was reminded again that this was real life for him now. Hard work was nice, but in the end, it was results that mattered.

That, then, led him to the war. Hilva.

“Do you know why Hilva has rebelled?” he asked. “I’ve been thinking on it a while now. It doesn’t make sense, does it?”

Amice shrugged. “I do not know,” she said, gazing off into the distance, mind churning. “I have only a rumor.”

“What rumor?” Anything would be of use, no matter how little.

“Our oracle, in Highharrow. He is able to see things in a way others cannot… it is not magic that gives him this power. I wondered if it might be a power of cultivation, once, before I made the pilgrimage to the holy city. I could sense no energy from him, no different than the thousands I have met before and after.”

“A gift from a God, then?” Alden asked. Amice tilted her head.

“I believe so.”

More and more, Alden realized, this world was filled with strange things he’d never thought to put together. Mana, cultivation, godly power. Any one alone would take a civilization thousands of years to fully understand.

If any could understand them all it would be him, he felt.

“It was perhaps a year or two ago,” Amice continued, “that I first heard the rumors. An incredible discovery, spoken of only in hushed tones. No one ever spoke of what the discovery was, not until recently. The Maker’s Mark, they called it. An artifact powerful enough to compete with the Gods.”

“What does it do?”

Amice pressed her lips together, searching for an answer. “I do not know,” she finally said. “Rumors are rarely so descriptive, I find.”

“And this was enough for them to rebel?”

“If the rumors are true,” she said. She looked at him, her eyes bright in the morning light. “Other than that, I could not say.”

The conversation slipped away, replaced with a bearable silence as they continued on.

Thinking on it, Alden was perturbed by what she had said. The rumor was true, most likely, or else close enough to the truth. Hilva needed something. A smaller, weaker nation willing to bet its future on a war must have had something up its sleeve.

What, then? That was the pertinent question. Armor, such as Amice’s, could be imbued with soul energy to empower it. Weapons as well. And mages, those who were particularly skilled or wealthy, made use of powerful enchanted staves that could bolster their magic a dozen times over. Then there was, of course, the hundreds of varieties of mystical plants and monsters, each boasting their own uses.

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Yet none were enough to wage a seemingly losing war.

He would not find answers to such a mystery traveling the plains in search of traitors, he decided. Better to focus on the path ahead of him.

“Sir!”

Alden turned to the voice, spotting Royce at the driver's seat of the leading carriage. He was pointing down to the ground.

“Tracks?” he yelled back. Royce nodded.

A hunter before the war, if Royce said there were tracks, then there were tracks. Sitting beside the carriage, Alden followed as Royce motioned toward the imprints on the ground. Small, round, and subtle, he could barely notice them through the grass even knowing they were there.

Skill Up

Learned Tracking Rank F

Reward: 50xp

“How many?”

“Five… no, six, by my count. That’d be the rest of them,” Royce said.

Six. That was all that remained. He would be glad to be done with them.

Following the tracks proved easy enough, eventually leading to the disordered remains of a campsite. Tall grass had been flattened where the men had lain, horse droppings littered the surroundings, and the charred remains of a campfire lay at the center. And blood.

Skill Up

Tracking has advanced to Rank D

Reward: 50xp

Whatever headway the Tribulation had given them, the deserters had lost it to some sort of fighting. Not infighting. They weren’t so foolish. But someone, or something, had attacked them.

And recently, if the corpse Amice found was any indication.

A thousand thick, blood-filled flies swarmed the corpse, eating away at the mess of its insides, their maggot-spawn crawling about the organs. Alden couldn’t say which man it had been. Neither could Uhtric, for that matter. The man’s chest had been carved open, his ribcage broken into a hundred shards, and his lower jaw had been torn clean off, leaving only a swollen pink tongue hanging loosely amongst the gore.

“What in hell did that?” Royce asked.

“I don’t know,” Alden said. A lie, at least partially. Despite the chaos of the wounds, he could picture what had happened in his mind. The issue was why.

From the camp was another trail of hoof prints, six in all. It made sense. The only corpse they had seen was human.

Tense, a pit of anxiety welled inside of him, twisting angrily in his stomach. He was not looking forward to what was to come.

Green grassland shifted to gray rocks, flat plains to a steady incline. The foot of the small mountain, its peak perhaps another two days' ride, assuming a steady pace and good weather. Their goal, however, sat right before them.

Squinting against the noon sunlight, he almost didn’t see them amidst the boulders. Green and red and purple against the gray of the rocks they sat on, once noticed their clothes became shining beacons. They sat, resting, their horses wandering freely and grazing on the mountain grass.

Alden slowed his horse, motioned for the carriages to stop. He dismounted, thankful to feel hard ground underfoot again after hours of riding. He was less thankful for the ache in his ass and legs.

He motioned again, then pointed to Amice, the message clear. Him and her, alone.

They approached carefully, moving slow from boulder to boulder, eyes always on their target. A dangerous move, especially with Amice’s armor. Glittering in the sunlight, all it would take was for one of them to look for longer than a second.

Not that it would matter, soon. Amice could catch them if they ran, butcher them before they made it ten feet. That was assuming Alden didn’t torch them with magic, first.

The men made little sound or movement; a handwave there, a burst of laughter there. As Alden drew closer he began to make out their faces. Gaunt and leathery, the harsh traveling had taken its toll on them, and he could barely recognize the men, if ever he could have to begin with. A bad habit of his, as always. And not one he should have kept as a leader.

All told, he could not place a name to any of the remaining men, and of the five only recognized two. One had been a rotund man with a long, harsh black beard, though he had lost considerable weight since last Alden had seen him, appearing almost of normal size.

The other was the tallest among those remaining, standing a head taller than the next. He had not been the tallest of the thirty men assigned to him, but he was among the three taller than Alden. He had never liked that.

Alden stopped and wiped sweat from his brow. He could see them all clearly now. Men and horses.

And wings.

Shouting and screaming, the men ducked and scrambled away as the peryton descended upon them from above, the horses scattering with fearful squeals. Brandishing its antlers like swords, the beast swung its head at the nearest man, impaling him and lifting him into the air. With a flap of its wings, the peryton lifted itself off the ground once more. The man wailed in agony as he was lifted with it, then, with a mighty shake of the beast's head, fell silent as his body was torn to raining chunks of red.

Floating softly down again, the remaining men, in a gust of courage, leapt toward the peryton with blades and spears. Releasing a terrible screech as metal bit into flesh, the peryton reared up, its front legs kicking furiously. It caught one of the men in the side of the head, caving in the man’s skull with a wet crunch.

As one the surviving three attack again, slicing a deep gash into the peryton’s right side, just beneath the wing. The beast screeched again, then fell to the ground, legs and wings flailing.

With a desperate charge, the rotund man moved fast, intending to kill.

“Stop!”

The men stopped, turned. One by one, they exchanged glances, unspoken words. They came to a decision, it seemed.

“You want this damned monster?” the rotund man said. His sword hovered near the beast’s throat, shining in the light, blood dripping from its tip. In the man’s hands it seemed thirsty for more.

“We’ll back off,” the tall man said. He took a step over a rock, moving toward one of the horses that hadn’t gone too far. “In return, let us go.”

“Let you go?” Alden asked, his hand tightening into a fist. The audacity! Had they forgotten what he could do? It would be a simple matter to kill them all with magic.

The third man, at least, seemed to understand that.

“We’ve information for you, sir,” he said. “In exchange for you letting us go.”

“What information?”

“Hilva, sir. Heard it from a few local villages. A group of’em have slipped past the border.”

His grip loosening, Alden observed the man. Sweating as much from fear as the heat, the man seemed to be telling the truth. Intriguing.

“If you’ve told me that much, why should I let you live?” he asked.

“We know where they’re going,” the rotund one said. “And it’s a two days ride to the nearest village. Wait that long to find out, and they’ll be long gone.”

Alden turned the offer over in his mind. A decent deal, if they were telling the truth. He believed they were.

Looking between them, Alden’s eyes settled onto the peryton. Breathing heavily, the beast screeched with every movement as blood poured from its wounds. Twisting its head, its black eyes settled on Alden’s, pleading.

They had made his decision for him.

Lifting a hand, Alden conjured three bolts of magic one by one and killed the men.

Victory

You have defeated your foes!

Reward: 450xp

With soft cries, the peryton watched as Alden approached. Reaching out with his hand, Alden brushed the beast’s feather-fur. Lashing out, the beast’s antlers narrowly missed his leg, instead scraping against the dirt and rocks with.

“Calm, now, calm,” he whispered. Reaching into his pack, he produced a block of cheese.

The peryton ceased movement, remaining completely still. Pushing the cheese forward, Alden watched as the beast ate from the palm of his hand.

Quest Completed!

Tame the Peryton.

Reward: 12,000xp, 10 bonus points to Charisma, 12 wheels of cheese, 12 loaves of bread, 7 pounds of dried meat.

Beast Tamed

Please provide a name for the tamed beast.

Alden dismissed the screens. There was no time for names.

Blood continued to flow from the beast’s open wounds, forming a puddle of red mud beneath it. It was only a matter of time before it perished.

Focusing, Alden cast healing magic on the beast, hopeful. Watching, his heart fell.

The peryton’s natural resistance to magic applied to all magic, as he’d feared, slowing his progress considerably. Even after minutes, despite draining his reserves, the creature’s wounds had not closed. The bleeding had stopped, however. A small victory.

It would have to suffice.