Chapter 69 - Don’t be Fooled
My non-existent heart froze as the clip clop of hooves echoed out from the dark to the east, back toward Eclipse, so close, so clear and loud that I was surprised I hadn’t noticed them before.
Beside me Trix was tense, his little foreclaws scratching at his fur and little voice mumbling something, his face drawn with intense focus.
The hoof beats drew closer, and I could now hear the labored breathing of the animal as it staggered down the road presumably to escape the horrors of the city behind it. It was a wonder it had lived that long, survived without becoming infected even after weeks of exposure.
The animal appeared to be one of the white, wiry haired creatures with broad shoulders and disproportionately tiny hooves I’d seen Garret and his people riding along this very road. I’d never gotten the name of those, since the whole scourge invasion thing had probably destroyed what chance I had of ever riding one. While the beast was on its feet and doing its level best to save itself from the nightmare of Eclipse, its rider was slumped over in the saddle, kept upright only by virtue of being caught in the stirrups..
This couldn’t have come at a worse time. We were about to cross this road, and here came someone that needed help. They were probably someone that came on the scene late, by chance, and now they were trying to escape with their lives.
If we hurried we could get them off the road and keep them from-
Stealth is now level 15.
Upgrade paths available:
Gray Man Upgrade: Fractured Recollection
Misdirect
Gray Man Upgrade: Mistaken Identity
Stealth Upgrade: Alert
The sudden burst of text in my log penetrated my thoughts just long enough to realize what I was doing.
Holy hell.
To say the least, I was sufficiently impressed.
Even with proper warning that the glamor was coming, my mind had been instantly fooled, instantly drawn to the illusion and fixed upon it while ignoring Trix or just accepting that his casting of magic was perfectly normal and right for the situation. The spell, according to Trix, obscured the caster and highlighted the illusion in the mind as well as through more mundane means.
I’d been told it was coming. Hell, I’d helped hatch the plan. And I’d still been taken in.
Now that I’d caught myself, I could see how strange the situation was, wrong. The rider and his animal were like scraps of a dream, smoke and impressions, general shapes of a man and his mount, but when I let my mind wander or drift further into the dream, they made more sense and became more real.
In a sense, they were almost too real if I could divorce myself from the idea of them for long enough to think rationally. I could smell them. I could even feel them there. I knew what the hairy mount felt like, despite never having touched one in my life. My mind was processing all of these things and substituting that flow of sensory data for the real thing, tricking me into thinking I was experiencing it.
Holy hell. Trix’s magic was dangerous. No wonder he had moral objections to using it.
I closed my eyes briefly and concentrated on not participating in the illusion. I was outside of it, an observer. This was not my dream, and I just needed to watch. I was separate from the scene with my own part to play that did not involve the mount and rider.
That seemed to help.
Trix kept the rider’s pace sedate, like the animal was wounded and tired, and the rider was unconscious. The two weaved over the road from side to side drunkenly. The faint scent of blood wafted into my nose-
No. Into my mind. Remember that. Focus on you, not them.
I frowned, diverting my mind to the choice the System had put in front of me. My choice of upgrade when I’d hit level 5 in stealth, Gray Man, might not have been on Trix’s level of mind mojo, but they were distantly related, I was fairly sure. Whatever discomfort I was feeling while watching Trix do his thing was made markedly worse knowing I was doing something like this passively when I was trying to hide. I was reaching into people’s minds and subverting their thoughts, and that was a scary prospect for a guy that was on a one way road to evil if I kept leveling the way I was. That gave me pause as I read over the Gray Man upgrade paths.
Fractured Recollection: Upgrade the capabilities of Gray Man to affect those who notice you for far longer. Short term memories of you will be harder for affected entities to recall with clarity. This effect is drastically reduced when being observed through technological means.
Mistaken Identity: Upgrade the capabilities of Gray Man to alter targets’ perception of you. Affected entities will be more likely to recognize you as someone familiar to them, personally, both in the moment and when remembering your encounter with them later.
Not sure if I want to go further down that path. Messing with people’s memories can’t be good for them, even if they are someone I want to hide from. Not sure if I could live with that.
The other two upgrades were more what I was looking for:
Misdirect: While actively hiding and partially obscured, you may choose to project an illusory copy of yourself up to thirty feet away. This copy mimics your actions and presence but produces no sensory data other than visual and magical.
Stealth Upgrade: Alert: While actively hiding you will now receive notifications in the event that you are detected. Entities that detect you may still be affected by Gray Man.
Both looked very useful, one situationally, the other universally. I wouldn’t mind being able to project an illusory clone. It would help me get away from things that hunted me, or it would help me get the jump on things I needed dead, not to mention being able to get my Knife in the Dark bonus more easily if my targets had to pay attention to two of me.
At the same time, Alert would just be plain useful all the damned time. How many times had I gotten a Stealth level and had no idea what was looking for me or if it had seen me eventually?
The upgrade had its limitations, of course. If I got a notification that I had been detected by a monster out there and Gray Man kicked in, telling said monster that I was nothing to worry about, I wouldn’t know. If I were hiding from multiple monsters, I’d have to choose between fleeing, fighting, or staying hidden, and the extra information might push me into a bad decision.
No. That was a useless line of thought. Of course more information was good. How I acted based on that information was on me, not Stealth. Alert would be a game changer, and I would have to rely on my better judgment to do the right thing with the information it gave.
Decision made, I looked over at Trix, and saw his tortured expression when our eyes met.
“The look on your face reminds me of why I do not do this,” Trix murmured, pausing his incantation only to say this. It didn’t seem to affect the illusion, however.
I really didn’t know what kind of look I had on my face. Half of my attention was on not slipping back into the dream, the other was busy trying not to draw parallels between what I did every day without thinking with what Trix deemed morally repugnant.
I put on a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry about us, Trix. You’re using what you have to save the damned world, so you’re still a saint in my book,” I said, giving him a small thumbs up.
“Stop doing that. No one knows what it means,” Sissa chided me.
Stupid Ralqir.
On the other side of Trix, Tiba saw the gesture and copied it, turning to her guards and giving them a thumbs up too. They seemed to dig it, taking to it like the rest of their tribe had to the middle finger.
If nobody else understood me, the goblins understood me.
“Your magic is a weapon, Trix,” Sissa continued, softening her tone for the Volpa. “I’d no sooner judge you for using it than judge Geddon for using his sword.”
Concentrating, Trix squeezed his eyes shut, and his lips peeled back slightly to expose his canines, but, after a moment, he acknowledged the point we were making with a slight nod.
The rider had passed us by now and was drifting slowly to the side until he practically collided with a tree full of the scourge-touched birds. The birds didn’t make a move, but I did hear some rustling from up in the tree.
I had a feeling, a sudden odd displacement of air that bent the hairs on my face and neck and instinctively put up my forearm to block an incoming blow. The blow never came, however, and Bole was conspicuously there shoulder to shoulder with me, breathing hard and smelling of swamp water and sweat.
“I put the thing in the thing,” he whispered, wiping his hands on his chest armor and flexing his fingers.
I tilted my head and watched him. “Something wrong?” I asked.
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“Yeah. You’re talking too much,” Bole spat. “Want to see this.”
Finally having tempted the birds enough, Trix nudged his illusion further down the road away from us. The wire-haired animal clip-clopped shakily onward, its head drooping downward as it fought exhaustion..
“Anytime, Trix,” I said.
Trix nodded but kept up his chanting.
The illusion stopped, the beast digging at the quellstone road nervously as it sniffed at the air.
The entire swamp took a breath… well, not the birds. We already established that they weren’t breathing.
Suddenly and inexplicably in a panic, the animal rose up on its hind legs, kicking out, and let out a high, warbling cry like an improperly fitted fan belt. The rider chose that moment to jolt back to consciousness, sucking in a greedy lungful of breath like it was his first in years. Then he screamed, a terrible, haunting thing that almost drew me into the dream again.
I was nearly up on my feet when Bole’s steely fingers clamped onto my wrist to arrest my forward momentum. It wasn’t enough to stop me, but it was enough to get me to think. I shot a glance in his direction and settled back down, nodding to indicate I was okay. He never met my eyes, though. His gaze was fixed on the scene before him as he grinned from ear to ear.
Now wide awake and in a full blown panic, the rider spurred his mount on, and the two of them flew down the road like they were being chased by demons which wasn’t entirely wrong at this point. Whatever the scourge had been waiting for as they watched the illusion make its way down the road, the sudden jolt of speed and the fear from their prey triggered some kind of predatory instinct in the birds, and they took to the air in a rushing hurricane of flapping wings.
Our world became a tapestry of motion, the entire road a sea of dark feathers, whirling and brushing over one another, a murder of flying scourge.
They matched speed with the illusion easily, but I imagine that was because Trix wanted them to. He wanted them to chase it, to think they were on the verge of drawing more blood. It wove in between the birds with ease, flowing through gaps in the swarm in a way that defied logic but only if you were not subject to the illusion.
“Almost there,” I announced for Trix. The illusion was nearing the log where Bole was supposed to drop the Automated ball of iron. Trix had the rider slip to the right, drawing near the log where it would finally-
“What? No, not that one. Further down the road, on the left,” Bole argued.
“You’re serious? Where?” I hissed at Bole. “We agreed on that one!”
“You pointed at that exact log, Monk!”
“I pointed at the only hollow log I can see, because I can’t see in the fucking dark, Bole!” I whisper-shouted in the man’s face, punctuating my sentence by waving a hand in front of my face.
“Boys, please,” Samila hushed us. “Can you get there, Trix? Can you see it?”
“Im- Yes. I think. Now!” Trix exclaimed.
With a thought, I Triggered the Automated construct I’d asked Bole to set up down the road and watched the chaos unfold. I’d not used my usual purple boom boom magic for this one. It was quickly becoming my calling card, and this needed to be more ambiguous. The fewer hints I gave the scourge that I was headed this direction the better, not until I was more prepared. Instead, I was using a new trick.
On the surface, the construct was just a ball of iron, about the size of a billiards ball. What it really was, however, was a billiards ball so packed with State Change mana in its Trigger, it had taken me the better part of an hour to fill, just enough to convert the entire thing from a solid to a plasma in a single instant.
The results were spectacular.
Plasma is a funny thing. By all accounts, observing with the naked eye in a vacuum it’s just a gas but hotter. The molecules have gained so much energy that they're bouncing around and running into walls like a kid that got into the chocolate espresso beans. The difference between plasma and a gas however, is, at some point when a molecule gets particularly riled up it sheds its electrons and suddenly becomes very friendly with all sorts of other molecules it normally would never want to associate with. Oxygen was a favorite, especially if introduced in atmosphere.
There was no explosion like one would associate with a giant conflagration, no boom. In this case there was a sound, something like *FUFF* followed by an absolute ton of muted firework crackles and pops as the superheated iron went from a packed and orderly solid to a free floating and quickly expanding cloud of overactive gas.
The air around the little construct ignited, the oxygen clinging to now superheated elements around it. A bright shower of sparks shot out from ground zero behind the log and enveloped fifty, maybe a hundred birds that were closest to Trix’s fleeing illusion. The birds closest to the reaction simply died, going up in individual fireballs with a loose downward trajectory. Other, ‘luckier’ monsters, simply caught fire and veered off, only to run into their fellows and set them ablaze. Those, not wanting to be on fire, took evasive action into other birds, and so on and so on.
Scourge-touched Flenser takes 23 damage. (20 base, +3 Knife in the Dark)(Fire)
Scourge-touched Flenser is Cursed.
Scourge-touched Flenser is Marked.
Scourge-touched Flenser takes 14 damage. (11 base, +3 Knife in the Dark)(Fire)
Scourge-touched Flenser is Cursed.
Scourge-touched Flenser is Marked.
Scourge-touched Flenser takes 33 damage. (30 base, +3 Knife in the Dark)(Fire)
Scourge-touched Flenser is Cursed.
Scourge-touched Flenser is Marked.
Scourge-touched Flenser takes 23 damage. (20 base, +3 Knife in the Dark)(Fire)
Scourge-touched Flenser is Cursed.
Scourge-touched Flenser is Marked.
Scourge-touched Flenser takes 20 damage. (18 base, +3 Knife in the Dark, +1 Marked)(Fire)
Scourge-touched Flenser takes 11 damage. (8 base, +3 Knife in the Dark)(Electric)
Scourge-touched Flenser takes 29 damage. (26 base, +3 Knife in the Dark, +1 Marked)(Fire)
Trix nearly collapsed in my arms as he let the illusion drop. I could hear him breathing laboriously, and his little arms and legs hung limply from his frame as if he’d just run a long distance and he had nothing left in the tank.
“Did I-” Trix panted. “Did I do it?”
“You did it, buddy,” I assured him, looking back to Sissa for confirmation, but she was covering her eyes to preserve her night vision. I probably should have done that. Everyone was probably nightblind now, but it was the cost of doing business. Bole, at least, was having a great time, giggling up a storm watching the murder of birds go up in flames.
“Tiba?” I asked. “Are we clear to cross?”
The little goblin queen got up on her tip-toes, poking her head out of cover and squinting into the dark to examine the road and the trees. Then she turned to me and gave a thumbs up.
Hell yeah. Thumbs up are going to be a thing.
“Let’s go,” I called, and we all got to our feet and rushed across the Dark Lord’s road.
I ran in the middle of the group, not bothering to look anywhere but forward. None of the birds that had been Marked by my attack lived long enough to be a threat, and the ones that had escaped the blast zone might as well have been invisible to me anyway. Plus, my eyes were shit, and my arms were full of vulpa. Even if we got into a skirmish I wouldn’t be able to fight.
Samila pulled me by the elbow, leading me across and into the brush on the other side, hastily slipping around shallow puddles and deadwood that might make noise. We had to be away before the scourge decided the rider and his mount were no longer worth their collective attention.
Stealth is now level 16.
We were maybe one hundred feet away from the scene when we heard something heavy dragging itself over the cobbled road behind us, loud enough for the sound to carry all the way to us through the trees. The swamp was alive now too, many creatures hastily beating a retreat from the unnatural fire.
At least one or two of them were probably infected and headed toward the fire, but we didn’t encounter them.
I wondered what the compass was saying now.
Tiba, naturally, took over for navigation, while Trix rested on my shoulders and recovered from his ordeal. He still had the compass, though, and would call out if we needed to change course. He also kept me out of the water much better than Samila had. Trix and I were old darkness buddies, so he knew what I was capable of and what I wasn’t. That helped with our pace.
Gradually, over the course of a mile, the land rose, and the swamp receded. I saw fewer pitfalls and standing water, fewer bugs and decaying logs that could trip me.
Then, without realizing it, I found myself climbing over jagged rocks, slippery with morning dew. The trees kept us from looking up to see how close the mountain range was, but I imagined we were getting close.
Sometime later, the last of the glowing bugs stopped materializing over the water, and the nighttime insects quieted down.
Light slowly bled into the gloom, a gradual thing that I didn’t notice until I caught myself actually watching Tiba do her thing at the head of our column. She would bound ahead, catlike, using her small stature and flexibility to slip between the leaves of fallen branches, over deadwood, and vault over rocks. Then, she would stop to tilt her head to listen to something I couldn’t hear and orient herself onto a slightly different course, presumably toward a place she knew.
I didn’t know how she was navigating, but she seemed confident, as only queens could be.
“She is leading us to the mouth of a pass,” Trix told me from my shoulder. “I have several depictions of it on the maps she drew for me. It is not one recorded in the Spire’s records, though I did not have much time to find the truly old ones in the library.”
“A pass over the mountain?” Sissa interjected. “Is there even enough cover to get us over?”
That Trix did not know, and it was down to me to ask Tiba. Now that it was light enough, I didn’t have a hard time jogging to the fore of the group and asking a few questions.
“The Black Ones are inside the mountain now, so we don’t take that way. We go through the pass. It is low enough to be below the frost,” Tiba declared, posing on a rock to get head height with me.
“But is there enough cover? Are mountain trees a thing?” I asked.
“Mostly,” Tiba hedged, wobbling her head side to side. “Not always. Very thin up that high, but there is usually cover enough this time of year. In the winter, we have to find another way.”
I translated for the others.
“We’re getting pretty close to winter,” Geddon observed as he looked dubiously at the thick canopy overhead.
“Do we wait for nightfall then?” Samila suggested, also subconsciously glancing up at the trees.
All the goblins shook their heads this time.
“A storm coming,” Tiba warned us, anxiety plain on her face. “They do that a lot, clouds ramming into the peaks like mountain goats. If we wait too long, the pass is flooded for days, and we have to go under the mountain. I do not want to go under the mountain again.”
Tiba’s gaze fell to the ground then, her shame at even tangentially admitting her fear of going back down there obvious. She’d lost many of her people down there, the love of her life included.
“Hope you wore your swimmies, Beedy,” Bole cackled. He was having a grand old time out here somehow, despite him looking like a drowned rat after having to sneak our bomb into place earlier.
Beedy looked down at his leggings and grimaced.
Samila sidled up to me on my right side and elbowed me gently in the ribs. “Tell me you packed some rope in those magic pockets of yours.”
I shot her a self-satisfied grin down at her. As a matter of fact, I had packed rope along with food, water, and an entire evil tower worth of metal bits. I was already probing my spatial storage for everything we might possibly need to cross.
“Alright, Brothers and Sisters, get to it. Climbing time. Essentials only,” Sissa ordered.
I tilted my head slightly, wondering as to what she meant.
Then a pauldron hit me in the chest.
Turning, I was greeted by Samila in the middle of stripping off her armor, her back to me. She already had the straps of her breastplate loose and was sliding the whole thing over her head peeling the wet padding and shirt underneath off in one motion. Her undergarments, just a crisscrossing handful of discolored cloth strips, clung to her muscular back in a disarrayed jumble like they’d been painted on by a toddler.
“You do have room in your magic pockets for my wet things, don’t you, darling?” Samila crooned, shooting me a wink over her now bare shoulder.
“Uh-” I replied smoothly. Why the System had not seen fit to give me more socially oriented Skills was a true mystery.
“Mine too! I am already naked back here,” Geddon’s voice announced from behind a nearby boulder, the top of which already held his full set of armor and shield.