We set up camp a little before dark.
During our travels, we passed several strange creatures, though none of them were openly aggressive. Some of them reminded me of things I would see from Earth like squirrels or deer, though they varied in slight ways like the deer having thicker builds and the squirrels having horns.
Others were stranger, like a miniature group of mushroom things that we saw circling a dead rat. They were all only inches tall, but one had a beard of fungus and held a staff. It was performing a kind of magic ritual as the rat dissolved into motes of black that each mushroom inhaled.
None of the others had seemed to pay the whole thing much mind, but I found myself replaying the strange scene again and again as we walked. The forest was brimming with life, it seemed, even though everything but the swarm of rootlings was trying to keep away from our large group. I was thankful for that.
A little bit of peace was welcome after the past few days.
When we stopped for the night, we realized nobody had any bed rolls or bedding. We found an open patch of dead leaves and did our best to push out a circular clearing of dirt. It wasn’t soft, but it was better than sleeping on rocks or tree roots. The adventurers and I positioned ourselves in a protective ring around the townspeople, who huddled together at the center, warming their hands by a fire. We were in the middle of a clear patch between an otherwise thickly wooded area. I hoped night wouldn’t bring more aggressive beasts out to hunt, but we kept at least one person on watch while the others rested.
I leaned against a small rock, which wasn’t exactly comfortable. I was sore from hiking through the woods all day, and even sitting up straight felt exhausting. I was sad I wouldn’t have the luxury of my personal space and bed tonight, along with the magically reduced need for sleep it would grant me. After only two days of my rare bed, I was already getting used to rising so early and getting more done with the extra time.
I practiced my abilities to pass the dwindling evening. I liked picking a goal for each session. This time, I was trying to find out if I could create an even smaller jet of liquid. Mostly, I wanted to know if I could somewhat regulate how much mana the ability used by projecting smaller quantities. It would be a nice thing to know in a pinch. After all, I wouldn’t always need overwhelming gouts of liquid to come flying out of my hands. Even a few drops could get certain jobs done.
When I finally got my hands on some more varieties of elements and potions to toy with, I might find even more reasons to be glad I had thought ahead.
I probably shouldn’t have tried two new things at once, but I was also still trying to see if I could make it spew out of my fingertips instead of my palm. It just seemed more appropriate to use my fingertips for small amounts. And based on what I understood so far of mana, there shouldn’t have been any reason I couldn’t project it from my ears if I wanted to.
I watched as a single drop of poison bubbled out of the skin on the tip of my forefinger. I smiled, turning my finger in the fading sunlight to examine the shifting liquid. Unlike the poison from my bottle, I seemed to have some kind of immunity to the mana I formed from my hands. I was wondering why that was when Lyria came and sat beside me.
“Please don’t tell me that’s a booger,” she said.
I flicked the poison from my finger to the ground, where it hissed softly.
“I get worn out just watching how often you practice.”
I shrugged. “Nothing else to do.”
“I guess I can’t blame you. It’s probably a lot to have on your shoulders. All that stuff Circa told you, I mean.”
I nodded, eyes focused on the fire and the townspeople a short distance away. “You know in my life before this I was kind of a healer?”
She pulled her chin back, tilting her head. “Really?”
“Sort of. We… used a kind of cart and wagon to take people to the best healer. My job was to help get them to the wagon and keep them alive till we made it.”
“Wait…” She lowered her voice, leaning closer. “You said you’ve never used a corestone.”
“I haven’t. We healed with practical methods. You have that on Eros, right? Bandaging wounds. Cleaning them. Plants you can eat to take away pain?”
“Oh,” she said, relaxing a little. “Yeah. We have that. So where did you really come from, anyway? It sounds strange.”
I chuckled. She had no idea. “It’s hard to explain,” I said. “But, it’s nothing like here. Nothing at all.” I looked up at the trees overhead, wondering how much I still didn’t know about this place. Were there dragons on Eros? Or maybe things far more terrible that nobody back on Earth had ever dared to dream up?
“Yeah, well,” Lyria said, interrupting my thoughts, “I wanted to give you a little warning.” She whispered, voice low as she leaned even closer. “You’re progressing too fast. Whatever is going on, you’re sprinting through things that are supposed to take people months, or at the very least weeks with the best possible training. You need to think of an explanation if one of them brings it up.”
I considered her words. “My helmet,” I said simply.
She laughed softly. “Are we going to use it to explain everything strange about you?”
I shrugged. “With the way it looks, who is going to doubt us?”
Lyria grew serious, then nodded her head. “Alright. Got it. So your helmet is how you already figured out a way to make that poison come out of your fingertip instead of your palm, right?”
“Actually,” I said, then I started rambling about my half-baked theories on mana flow and what I’d learned about visualizing, but Lyria cut me off with a smile.
“What?” I asked.
“I’m not saying I enjoy your company, so don’t go twisting my words. But I will say I’m sorry I was tough on you at first. You’re not quite as bad as I had you pegged.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate that.”
“Yeah, well, I took you for some snobby noble’s outcast. The type comes through frontier towns like Riverwell all the time. They’re pampered princes or princesses shoved out of the nest by Daddy. They’ve got slips full of coins and fancy heirlooms. They buy their way up the ranks by hiring powerful adventurers to drag them through danger.” She wrinkled her nose as if the thought alone disgusted her. “Anyway. You’re not quite as bad as that type. Even if you did accidentally wind up in a similar situation.”
“Sorry, but I showed up in stitched-together tomte clothes and covered in blood, puke, and poison. And you took me for a pampered noble?”
“Those were tomte clothes?” she asked, lowering her voice and leaning forward.
“What did you think they were?”
“I chalked it up to your strangeness and had them burned after you left. They smelled awful.”
I laughed. “Yeah, well, I’m no prince.”
“Nope, just you know who,” she said. Her tone was light enough that I took her words for playful rather than reproachful, though.
A few comfortable moments of silence passed as we watched the townspeople. They were sitting in a circle as the little kids played some kind of game that had them all chuckling and gesturing. I enjoyed watching them. I also enjoyed the feeling of protecting them. I supposed that shouldn’t have come as a great surprise, though. Back on Earth, I’d chosen a career that involved trying to save people from their worst moments. Here, it felt like I could do more than I ever could have on Earth. I wouldn’t just be flicking drops of water toward a fire. I could become a rushing torrent—a tsunami that could snuff out even the worst flames. All I had to do was keep working toward it and trying to survive.
“You’re surprisingly good with those little girls for such a grump,” I said after a while. “Do you have sisters?”
Lyria pulled her knees up, wrapping her arms around them, and her eyes grew distant.
“Sorry,” I said quickly. “I shouldn’t have asked, I—”
“It’s alright. I did, yeah.” She pursed her lips in a sad smile and shrugged. “We lived in a small town like Riverwell. Infestation from the river went unchecked for too long because the guards were lazy and untrained. They came at night…” Lyria trailed off and chewed the inside of her mouth, then got up suddenly. “If you are who she said you are, I want to stick it out with you. Because I think you’re the kind of person who wouldn’t let things like that happen. Don’t prove me wrong.”
She walked back to her spot and sat down with her back to me, eyes focused on the trees.
#
Even without the benefits of my rare bed, I woke earlier than everyone but Perch and Bloody Steve. Perch was a little distance from the camp and doing some kind of slow martial arts practice, with his hands moving slowly in careful patterns. Bloody Steve was… building a small tower out of smooth stones, then smashing it to pieces with his hammer like a child.
I shook my head, got up and stretched. Sleeping fully clothed with a massive horned helmet on was a little hard to get used to, but thankfully, it was comfortable inside the helmet. I still itched to pluck it off my head when I remembered I was wearing it. Whenever I got tempted, I thought about Circa’s warning of what could happen if the wrong person recognized me.
I poked around the bushes, kneeling and inspecting all the vegetation I could find. I was hunting for new herbs. With my herbalist’s lens, I could inspect the corpse-like fingers I used to make my rot poison and see “Destruction” in the tooltip’s description. I could also see “Recovery” in the description of the pink flowers that made the refreshing potion I drank that first day.
I’d been looking for herbs all day yesterday with no luck, but I finally found something that looked like an ingredient by a small pond near our camp.
It was a greasy plant resembling a frog’s foot with bulbous, clear green ends. First, I stuffed it in my bag of duplication, pulled the strings, and then opened it to find the quantity had doubled.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
“Nice,” I whispered. I had already duplicated the few herbs I had left, which turned my supply of “almost nothing” to “not much” for both the pink flower and the corpse fingers. I supposed it wasn’t completely dire because I could keep an infinite supply of rot poison in my kit, so long as I never emptied it.
I pulled a piece of the greasy plant out from my bag of duplication and held my herbalist lens up in front of it.
[Flipweed, (Common) (Modification)?]
Until now, I hadn’t wanted to risk emptying my Alchemist’s Kit for any reason. The rot poison had saved my ass too many times for me to want to go without it, even briefly. It felt as smart as a soldier unloading all his weapons in the middle of a warzone.
I looked around myself. The forest was quiet in the early morning, as shafts of red-tinged sunlight streamed between the trees. That odd, extra planet was hanging in the sky, surrounded by a few puffy white clouds.
Surely, we’re safe enough for the next few minutes… right?
I had something I needed to figure out. Essentially, I wanted to know if my Alchemist’s Kit was creating new liquid each time I broke it, or if it was somehow magically recalling the spilled contents.
If it was the former, I’d be able to fill as many empty vessels with potion as my cooldown allowed. If it was the latter, I wasn’t ever getting more than I brewed, I was just able to keep recycling it.
The recycling option would mean no unlimited money schemes. I wouldn’t be able to buy empty bottles and sell an expensive potion over and over, using my brief cooldown to create a huge stockpile. I supposed I could think of an immoral way to make money, even from a potion that would be sucked back into my bottle when broken. I could sell sips, for example. Or I could swindle people by selling them a bottle of something that would vanish once I’d collected my money and broke the bottle, recalling the contents to myself.
None of that seemed very godly, though, and I couldn’t picture myself going that route.
I set up a quick test.
First, I stuffed ten of my twenty empty glass vials in the dirt so they were upright and I wouldn’t need to hold them.
I carefully poured rot poison from my Alchemist’s Kit, filling each of the ten finger-thin vials. I still had more than half of my Kit left when I was done.
Alright. Now the only thing to do was break the bottle. If the vials were still full when it respawned, I had a money printer on my hands.
I chucked my bottle hard at some rocks a good distance away. It shattered.
I looked to the vials and watched the liquid inside start to turn black and flake away like Jinglefoot’s knife had on that first day.
Damn it.
There was just one more thing I wanted to know for now. Breaking the bottle apparently recalled the contents to the respawned Kit. But what happened if I brewed a potion, poured it, and didn’t break the bottle? What if I just brewed a new potion? Would the stuff I poured out still evaporate?
I briefly considered using my new Flipweed, but decided there was no point wasting it right now. I wasn’t going to drink it, and I’d be immediately replacing it with rot poison, so it would go to waste.
So I dumped my poison and used a pink flower to brew some refreshment potion.
To my relief, nothing happened to the poison in the vials.
Thank God.
Feeling a little better, I finished the somewhat tedious task of filling the last ten vials with refreshment potion and then brewing rot poison with my second-to-last corpse finger, reloading my Kit.
Lyria wandered up to where I was fiddling with my potions. She knelt by the stream, cupped some water, and splashed her face.
“Hey,” I said. I still felt a little awkward about how our conversation had ended last night.
“I’m surprised I didn’t find you spraying poison out of your hands or making those little cloud bottles again.”
“Just making sure I understand this thing as much as I can,” I said, hefting the Alchemist’s Kit in one hand.
Lyria nodded, grinning a little.
“What?” I asked.
“I thought you were over here taking a break. It turns out you were still busy trying to improve.”
“Hey, you two,” Kass said. He pointed his thumb over one shoulder. “We’re packing up and getting ready to head out.” He had just rolled out of bed but looked immaculate. His blonde hair was perfectly coiffed, and his smile was sparkling. I didn’t know how the man did it. I was surprised I hadn’t seen Lyria trying to hang around him more. He seemed like exactly the kind of guy that girls would fall over themselves for. Instead, she seemed to mostly just talk to Minara, play with the kids, or harass me about training too much.
Kass strolled back toward the camp.
I stood, brushing dirt from the back of my pants. Looking down, I saw my fancy new clothes weren’t so fancy anymore. My knees were mud-stained from messing with my potions. My shirt had a huge hole in it surrounded by a bloodstain from getting stabbed by the rootling. My hood had a pair of tears because a tree branch had caught it and yanked it straight through my horns. On top of that, I was covered in mud and dirt on just about every other surface.
“What?” I asked when I noticed the way Lyria was looking.
“You’re thinking about a bath again, aren’t you?”
“No,” I lied.
She laughed as we walked back toward the camp. “I don’t know if I’ve met a man so obsessed with hygiene before. You make me feel like a slob.”
“I’m not obsessed with hygiene. Where I come from, it wasn’t crazy to bathe twice a day. And you could wash your hands before you ate.”
Lyria wiggled her fingers and rolled her eyes. “He even washes his hands before he eats. What a fancy little lord.”
I gave her a playful shove. “Shut up.”
When we got back to camp, Bloody Steve was kneeling with Perch. They were talking about something they saw in the dirt.
“Problem?” I asked.
“Only if you hate smashing giant bugs,” Bloody Steve said.
“Uh… Let’s say I’m not a huge fan of it?”
“Then you got a problem.” He pointed to a footprint. “See that?”
I tilted my head. The print seemed almost bird-like, but the toes seemed more like straight sticks than talons. It looked alien compared to anything I’d ever seen. “What is it?”
“I used to hunt these parts back in my Wood days,” Steve said thoughtfully. “It’s some sort of bug, for sure. My guess is carapax. Probably a scout.”
“That means we’re close to a queen’s nest,” Perch said.
“So we should be careful,” I said slowly.
“Exactly,” Bloody Steve agreed. “If we’re not careful, we might miss the opportunity to behead a carapax queen and steal her nectar.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Lyria said. “We’re supposed to be escorting these people safely.”
“Aye,” Bloody Steve said, as if he hadn’t detected the conflict.
“A carapax queen’s nectar is worth more than they’re paying us,” Perch said. “We could all walk away from this mission with several gold. Each.”
“Biggest share for me, of course,” Bloody Steve said.
“And what happens if we die trying?” I asked. “We’re going to risk nine people’s lives because we’re greedy for a little money.”
“A few gold ain't a little money, young pup,” Bloody Steve said. “I could buy a night with a naidu whoress for half that. Something about their blue skin really gets my blood pumpin’...”
I shook my head. “We’re not really considering that, right?” Lyria asked, looking to me.
“No,” I said firmly. “I want money as much as the next guy, but there has to be a better way. Get them to Thrask, then circle back here when they’re not counting on us, for example.”
“Not doing what?” Kass said as he approached with Minara.
Perch explained the situation, and Minara immediately folded her arms and shook her head. “Absolutely not. Do you have any shame?”
“What good is shame?” Bloody Steve asked, smiling. “Can I eat it? Can I sell it? Then feck it!” he said, giggling a little.
Perch flashed a crooked smile. “I know when to tell my shame to look the other way. You in, Kass?”
I expected the man to refuse, but he gave me a reluctant look. “They may only be thinking of the gold, but the truth is we’re already in danger. If we’re in carapax territory, they may have our scent. There’s an argument to be the hunter, rather than the hunted.”
I narrowed my eyes. “If we can risk attacking them directly, then trying to get out of their territory before they strike is obviously less risky.”
Kass sucked his teeth. “Yes and no. If we kill the queen, the soldiers will give up the hunt. We could be talking about the difference between fighting hundreds of Wood ranked, armored bugs the size of bears. Or we could sneak in, behead the queen, and save ourselves the risk.”
“And there’d be gold,” Bloody Steve added with a grin. “Lots of gold.”
We spent a few minutes debating the situation until we finally settled on a solution. Steve, Kass, and Perch would try to ambush the queen on their own. If they succeeded, Kass would split his share from the nectar with us. Bloody Steve and Perch seemed more interested in the nectar. Kass, on the other hand, seemed as though he actually believed we would be making the safest choice by killing the queen—nectar or not.
I still tried to convince them to give up the idea entirely, but once I saw there was no changing their minds, I agreed to wait with Lyria and Minara to protect the townspeople. If they weren’t back by then, we could figure out a plan from there. Likely, the “plan” would mean abandoning the three men to their fates and trying to make our way to Thrask alone.
With the plan in place, we looked for a safe place for the rest of us to hide out while Kass, Perch, and Bloody Steve went after the queen. It took us the better part of an hour, but we eventually found a rocky wall topped by trees.
After following it for a while, we discovered a small cave entrance mostly hidden by overgrown shrubs. If the carapax attacked while the others were gone, it would at least give me, Lyria, and Minara a narrow choke-point to defend. It also would get us out of the open while they were hunting the queen.
Once we were sure the cave was empty and safe, the three men headed out, leaving us to our own devices.
“We can handle this,” I said, sounding more sure than I felt once they were gone.
Lyria sighed. “I still don’t like this. I think they’re just making excuses to go after the nectar.”
“Maybe,” I agreed. “But Kass seemed to really believe we would be safer if we went for the queen. I think we’re relatively safe here for the time being. We’ll give them some time, and if they don’t come back, we just… move on without them.”
“Meanwhile,” Lyria said, “we’re supposed to hope swarms of giant bugs don’t descend on us.”
“Honestly,” Minara said, “I’m surprised you two didn’t go to join them. The way they’re acting is quite normal for adventurers. It’s rare to find people who still hold any kind of moral compass. Outside protected environments like the Radiant Academy, morality has a way of getting people killed.”
“It’s going to be fine,” I said, hoping I sounded more confident than I felt.
Minara left to go talk to the townspeople, probably in an attempt to calm them down. They were all obviously agitated, as they should be. Half their escort and the only Iron were gone, and for all we knew, they wouldn’t come back.
I put the men from my thoughts and held off training for once. If the three of us were the only ones standing between the townspeople and danger, I needed to be at full mana and ready for a fight.
Hours passed and there was no sign of them returning. With each hour, my confidence waned. On the one hand, they could already be dead. On the other hand, they could have succeeded, claimed the nectar, and felt it wasn’t worth doubling back to finish the escort job. If that nectar was worth what they said, the amount we were getting paid for this would be peanuts by comparison.
I rubbed the back of my neck. I was aware that the townspeople were silently watching us. The weight of their fear hung heavy on me. It felt like Minara and Lyria were watching me, waiting for a decision, even though I didn’t see why they’d defer to my opinion.
“One more hour,” I suggested.
Everybody nodded. It seemed like nobody was overly eager to go back out there with diminished numbers. Especially if we could simply wait a little while longer and hope they would return.
I was nearly ready to tell everybody to pack up and get moving when I heard something rustling outside the cave. I glanced at Lyria, who nodded. She heard it too.
Shit, I thought.
“Everybody hide,” I whispered. The cave was full of nooks and hideaways, and within seconds, they were able to practically vanish from sight.
I formed up with Minara and Lyria as we slowly crept toward the entrance of the cave, ready to make a last stand.